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Re: vocal synthesis and processing
Dear Erdem,
I second Buzaps glowing review of Melodyne.
You can do really interesting things with that program
and they even give you the ability to extract some 'fixed frequencies' from
manipulated tracks and pitch them separately from the pitch content of
the vocals
(this works fantastically on percussion by the way..............creating
naturalistic
percussion tracks that feel, nonetheless, that they are from some ethnic
culture from
another planet: alien , yet organic.............one of my favorite
qualities of new sound design.
Additionally, here are several thoughts I've had about vocal use and
vocal manipulation:
1) Take a look at the old stalwart, ReCycle, which was the program
that caused the revolution
in Drum and Bass.............designed to slice up drum tracks and then
send each 'slice' to
a sampler in a numbered and ordered set of samples that can then be
retriggered in a midi program.
You can also set your own slice points manually in such a program.
Sometimes it is really cool to just take the very beginnings and endings
of words, cut them up and separate them
from the words they came from and put them in in unusual places during
and over the track.
2) A lot of breath noises, ticks, inhalations, lip smacks, etc. can
be fascinating spices for an unusual vocal track
used as rhythmic elements outside of their normal context.
3) Tuareg is a wonderful standalone app for the PC that does very hip
slicing and dicing of vocal tracks.
Buy the $35 version and be glad you did. You'll thank me for this one!
4) Our very own Matthias Grob and Andy Butlers' ChoPitch is a
fantastic manipulator of vocal tracks.
I can't more highly recommend it.
5) You might reference the all acapella vocal CD I put out called Faux
Voix.
_*
http://www.looppool.info/fauxvoix.html*_
The whole record is just an experimental exploration of vocals and
computer generated vocals.
I also really worked hard for almost two years to develop a whole new
series of
'extended' vocal techniques, many of which I used on that record.
6) Heres' a vocal slice experiment from that recording:
_*
http://www.looppool.info/Chris_Slice_Funk.mp3*_
By saying this, I'm saying, use your own voice and see what odd
things it can do.
If you get over the weird feelings and the strange looks you get by
making unusual sounds, there are
hundreds of interesting sounds that can be made with the human voice and
most people
don't do it because it is too 'strange' for normal society.
The beauty of all of these experiments is that all of these sounds are
made with the vocal chords, the uvula, the lips, the teeth,
the tongue and all the combed frequencies that one can achieve with
these sounds because our throat is , essentially, a pipe.
6) I experimented with uvulal singing, overtone singing, noise
manipulation, hum whistling, whistle humming (there is a difference, lol),
trill singing, chest beaten harmonic manipulation, piccolo trumpet
noises, kissing (which as Jeff Kaiser hipped me to, is high velocity
inhalation, the opposite of how a trumpet is played), warble singings,
physical object manipulation of voice (singing in and through things
that effect the sound), growling, humming, trilling, etc.
Here's an example of a live thing I did in concert from the
Festival of Voice and Electronics utilizing some of those techniques.
Everything you hear was made live in concert using only my voice.
_*
http://www.looppool.info/Faux_Voix_Composite.mp3
*_
7) There are VST instruments out there that mimic the vocal formant
frequencies of the human voice so that if you put
other melodic material through it, it sounds LIKE a voice.
8) Vocoders also have this voice-esque quality on anything.
Try Vocoding a different vocal..........in other words, use the voice
to vocode a sample of a voice.
You can get really cool results from trying to sing to lyrics in the
exact same rhythm, but sing them with
radically different styles or in different ranges.............then
vocode one with the other.
9) Then there is the processing of the
voice...............................I won't even go there........this
post would go on forever.
10) Our own Cara Quinn hipped me to software that 'reads' websites to
blind people.
I did a couple pieces using that software. She and I used to exchange
vocal generated compositions.
One piece of software gave one the ability to download different voices
from different cultures
(the Brazillians pronounce Rs like Hs while the English pronounce Rs
like, well, Rs)
Many different cultures have radically different consonant sounds
and different phonemic combinations vowel sounds.
As an example, in Korean, there appears some syntactical rule that
says , when you end a word with a long held out vowel sound
that the pitch will pend down at the end of the word.
Vowels representing combed filtered sine waves and Consonants
representing various percussive and noise sounds,
I typed hundreds of vowel combinations to try and extract simple
melodies from them.
I snipped anything that sounded melodic (like when you ask a question in
English, the pitch goes up at the end of the question so it
represents a simple melody, pitchwise) and put them in a folder.
Later I went back and put many of them together to compose my melodies.
Here's an example of that experiment:
_*http://www.looppool.info/Sweeping_Mary.mp3
*_11) Also reference Michiko Kawagoe's brilliant work with an invented
computer vocal languages
Okee dokee, ..............these are the thoughts I've been having and
wanting to write to you since I read your
question to the group.
be well, and good luck with the project..........congratulations!
yours, Rick