Actually, I haven't written the MusicXML or MIDI import yet. I've played around with it enough to know that I can do it, I just haven't gotten around to it.

So at this point, the program's got a stand-alone GUI. Open it up, and enter music, either via the mouse, or the (typewriter) keyboard using the durations (w, h, e, s, t) and the arrow keys to move up and down. You can drag notes up and down, and change the duration by dragging left and right. You can also adjust the duration via the [ and ] keys, as in Noteflight.

There's no support (yet) for ties, slurs or tuplets. Barlines are optional, but if you don't add them, you won't be able to navigate left if there are too many notes in the measure!

When you enter text in the box below the music notation, it's automatically attached to the notes. You should hyphenate the text, but the program will try to do it for you if you don't.

A song can have multiple sections, each one in it's own key.

The biggest caveat is that if you've got multiple sections, you need to set up the song order (Song | Order Song Sections). You can repeat sections of the song. You can also copy sections, and then change the lyrics of the new section instead of having to re-enter all the notes.

It's a Java application, but I've wrapped it so it looks like a Windows .exe file:

synSinger.exe

If you prefer, there's also a .jar file, which should run on a Mac or Linux:

synSinger.jar

Eventually I'll post the code on SourceForge.

It takes a moment to open, because it's loading up a couple of dictionaries. When you first try to play a song/section back, it may take another couple of moments because it's allocating the buffers.

I'm hoping that adding a few more formants and using values of a singer (instead of a speaker, which is where I got the values from) helps somewhat. I'm also going to try using recordings of consonants instead of synthesizing them. But it's always going to sound robotic - that's the nature of the technology.

All this is a long-winded way of saying you can just fire the program up and start playing with it - no MusicXML required.

Let me know if you've got any questions!

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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