For those following the progress of this project, I'd hoped that I'd have a final version of my synthetic singer program completed back in March. However, it had a bad case of the mumbles, and I headed back to the drawing board to rewrite it. It's been eating my spare time since then.

I spent far too much time trying to get synthesized plosives and fricatives working. Then I listened to earlier versions of the program, and realized how much better they sounded using samples instead. So all that work got tossed out, and I ended up writing the code from scratch... again. cry

Just the other day, I got the code to where it is again reading MusicXML files and generating .wav files. There's still a lot of work to do, but the end is (hopefully) in sight.

I've been using Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" as my demo song, and here's the most current version, warts and all. For example, I haven't yet figured out why it can't say "world" correctly.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star #15

As a change of pace, I decided to do my own version of Daisy Bell, one of the first examples of computer generated singing. It's still missing some phonemes, so I've cheated in spots. For example, the /G/ is actually /D SH/. The lyrics were automatically converted to phonemes, but I did some replacement by hand because the allophonic replacement code isn't working yet.

I also added some compression and reverb because everything sounds better with reverb. Just to let you know, it doesn't sound quite this good out of the box... But it sounds exactly as bad wink.

Anyway, here's synSinger singing "Daisy", as well as the 1961 version by Max Mathews, John Kelly, and Carol Lochbaum, which I found on Perry Cook's website. To make comparison easier, they're in the same key and tempo:

Daisy Bell (IBM 7094)
Daisy (synSinger)



I've always been curious about what software was used to generate the computer performance 55 years ago. It turns out that the data was hand-coded into the computer. That explains why I was never able to find any references to the text-to-singing program... It never existed! blush

As always, comments (positive or negative) are always appreciated.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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