Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
David, your good work should be brought to the attention of Peter Gannon.

When the work is good enough, he'll hear it. wink

Actually, when the work is good enough, I'll start posting on the forum for feedback.

I've already written to Peter about this. I'd like to see something better than Sinsy, but there aren't a lot of people promoting singing voice synthesis programs.

There are a lot of free projects (including Sinsy, which recently released their code), but most of them are abandoned, and the websites are filled with dead links.

Vocaloid would be too expensive to add to BiaB.

On the Mac, there's a program called VocalWriter that uses articulatory synthesis, but it's never been ported to the PC, and (unfortunately) the author died several years ago. His wife is looking to sell off the product, but I doubt PG wants to go that route.

The Mac actually has a quite nice vocal synthesis program built in, but there's no PC equivalent. (Finally, somewhere the Mac users are finally ahead! wink )

I believe the best commercial bet is SoftVoice, which has has a rather nice library. The owner is pretty busy right now, but he said he'd try to get me a demo. You've probably heard their product in some incarnation - Software Automatic Mouth, MacInTalk and Talk-It! are some examples. The speech sounds a bit synthetic, but it's understandable and (to my ears) superior to Sinsy.

If I get a demo from SoftVoice, I'll post the results on the forum. But I haven't seen the API yet, and creating singing output isn't entirely trivial.

In the mean time, I've dusted off my own speech synthesis program (mainly because Sinsy seems so deficient). It uses formant synthesis for vowels (like SoftVoice, but it uses sampled consonants. It can now read the MusicXML file from BiaB, covert the words to phonemes, and output a .wav file.

Unfortunately, the new consonants broke the timing code, so I'm trying to fix things back up again. Once it works, I'll start posting some examples to get feedback.

It's written in Java, but once it's done if it's any good I'll give some thought to re-writing it into C (or with a language which can compile to C).

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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