Quote:

What controls do you need for a note, other than the time, duration, note number, and the lyric


It depends which program you're talking about.

Sinsy takes well-formed MusicXML. There are a lot of elements in MusicXML that aren't required, and it looks like it'll accept a pretty minimal MusicXML file. As I mentioned, just about any music notation will generate MusicXML, and while it's a bit verbose, it's not that hard to generate.

Off tangent for a moment...

I haven't got a Vocaloid, but I know that it's got it's own VSQ file format. It imports MIDI data, and I suspect that's how most people interface with it.

I won't even touch UTAU... There's way too much fiddling to get the Japanese localization working on my machine, and it's only half-translated anyway.

The free Festival system had an old XML file format that looked a lot like what you're describing - a note list of phonemes with pitch and timing. You can see an example of it here. I haven't kept up with Festival, and the document is pretty old (in computer years) - back in 2002.

End of tangent

Quote:

How many other parameters can you enter, for example, is there a strength setting (and is it 0-9?) and vibrato information?


The Sinsy documentation (on the main page) says:

The following musical symbols are supported: tie, slur, staccato, accent, dynamics, crescendo, decrescendo, breath mark.

Quote:

Can you be more precise for the timing, for example, to start at bar 1, beat 1, tick 23 (out of 120 PPQ), and last for 87 ticks (120 PPQ).


Yes, MusicXML will let you get down to that resolution. There are two portions to MusicXML: the displayed notation, and the actual performance. Like MIDI, you specify you base tick value, and you can give the timing relative to that tick. Here's an example (sorry, but the indentation is lost):
Quote:

<measure number="6">
<attributes/>
<note>
<pitch>
<step>B</step>
<octave>5</octave>
</pitch>
<duration>192</duration>
<voice>1</voice>
<type>half</type>
<dot/>
<lyric number="1">
<syllabic>single</syllabic>
<text>this</text>
</lyric>
</note>
</measure>


Really, the simplest thing to do is export a MIDI melody from BiaB, import it into just about any music notation program, add lyrics and export the MusicXML.

While Sinsy is really cool in that it automatically does this stuff, I don't know what their licence is, and I don't know that there's any guarantee that the web site will stay up, and how accessible it will be.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?