When I posted a song a while back recorded using Sinsy, Don Gaynor had expressed hope that with this sort of technology he'd be able to sing again. While the fine folk at DynaVox haven't gotten back to him yet, I thought I might have a go at solving the problem.

You may have noticed I've been a bit absent from the board since then. blush

Here's the result: Loch Lomond (with harmony)

It's "state of the art" 1980's formant synthesis. It's not the technology I'd intended to use, but that's a rather long story. I'm still working out the bugs in the code. It's not ready for end users, but it's finally "singing."

There's a bit of post-processing on the vocals. I used the PG Vinyl plugin to reduce some of the popping on consonants, and a low-pass filter to kill some of the high-end noise. I've also run things through EZ Mix to add some reverb and compression.

Most of the phonemes are fairly acceptable, but there's an /H/ and /L/ that seem to have gone missing. I've only tweaked one of the phonemes. At 0:15 there's what sounds like a breath noise. It's actually a bug, so I lowered the volume there. (I intend to add support for breaths at some point).

The accompaniment is PJONPBA.STY (PopBalladPiano & Ac.Guitar[85RS]). I guessed at the chords from the sheet music, so there may be some clinkers in there. The harmony is just thirds above the melody, so there may be some clinkers there, too.


-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

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