Yamaha Releases Singing Synthesis Software

loopdloop writes "The world's first singing synthesis software, Vocaloid, was released by Yamaha this month at the Los Angeles NAMM show. Simply type in the lyrics and notate the vocal expressions to create a completely computer-generated singer. There are also audio demos of the product available." Update: 01/26 21:14 GMT by S : An earlier NYT-authored preview of this software has also been covered on Slashdot.

Comments

Mandatory Radiohead quote

[Petronius]

Fitter, happier, more productive
Comfortable
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym
(3 days a week)
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well
(No more microwave dinners and saturated fats)
A patient better driver
A safer car
(Baby smiling in back seat)
Sleeping well
(No bad dreams)
No paranoia
Careful to all animals
(Never washing spiders down the plughole)
Keep in contact with old friends
(Enjoy a drink now and then)
Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall)
Favours for favours
Fond but not in love
Charity standing orders
On Sundays ring road supermarket
(No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants)
Car wash
(Also on Sundays)
No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows
Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate
Nothing so childish - at a better pace
Slower and more calculated
No chance of escape
Now self-employed
Concerned (but powerless)
An empowered and informed member of society
(Pragmatism not idealism)
Will not cry in public
Less chance of illness
Tires that grip in the wet
(Shot of baby strapped in back seat)
A good memory
Still cries at a good film
Still kisses with saliva
No longer empty and frantic like a cat tied to a stick
That's driven into frozen winter shit
(The ability to laugh at weakness)
Calm
Fitter
Healthier and more productive
A pig in a cage on antibiotics

Re:So...

[mcpkaaos]

The irony behind your comment is that vocals from "artists" such as Britney Spears, Christina Aguilara (sp), etc, go through extreme re-engineering after recording (beyond the norm of compression, reverb, EQ, etc.) Once the audio is filtered through tools that re-pitch the parts that go off-key and time-stretch the bits that fall out of rhythm, you have an end result that really isn't all that far from a computer generated voice.

Re:Human voice

[spun]

Machines can have emotions if we want them to. There was even an article in last month's Scientific American by an AI researcher who claims that machines will need emotions for real AI to work. There have been several robotics/AI projects that have attempted to incorporate emotions, Cynthia Breazeal's robot Kismet being the most famous.

Emotions are an information processing system that works holistically, priming the logical parts of the brain for the kind of work they will need to do. Big orange and black stripey thing running towards you? Prime the brain for a flight or fight response rather than curiosity, i.e. "Run, it's a tiger!" not "I wonder if this orange and black stripey thing wants to play?"

There remains the problem of qualia. That is, a robot may look for all intents and purposes as if it is having emotions, but does it feel the same things internally as we do? Unfortunately, there's no real way of knowing if even other humans feel the same thing we do.

When the day comes that a robot belts out a blues song about someone done it wrong and broke it's heart, we will judge it in the same way we judge human singers: Does it look and sound authentic, or is it faking it? If it looks and sounds authentic, I believe that we will take it for granted that it feels the same as we do, just as we take it for granted in other humans.

Is not

[filtersweep]

I have several vocoders, software and hardware, and it is obviously a very different creature if you took the time to listen to the demos. Also, a proper vocoder needs an carrier, and it does not generate the vocal qualities. It merely functions as a formant filter (where the constanants are provided by the vocalist, and the pitch by usually a synthesizer).

Frankly, this thing just really needs a good plug-in format, like TDM or VST and it will be a gold-mine- not unlike those god-awful pitch-correction plugins that were reputed to give Cher that plastic effect to her voice (like she doesn't have enough plastic as it is). As a standalone app, it is doomed.