Here’s a singer that won’t get too drunk before the performance. These HRP-4C Singing Humanoid Robots will soon be replacing Mariachi bands at weddings all of the world. I’m kidding of course.
“A robot is a virtual or mechanical artificial agent. In practice, it is usually an electro-mechanical machine which is guided by computer or electronic programming, and is thus able to do tasks on its own. Another common characteristic is that by its appearance or movements, a robot often conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its own.” – Wikipedia
For more info: diginfo.tv
This entry was written by , posted on October 26, 2010 at 4:49 am, filed under hardware and tagged robot, vocaloid. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Here’s a tasty new iOS vocoder from Germany software house Virsyn called iVoxel. When it comes to vocoders clarity is king. This is why in the past I’ve mostly used non-traditional vocoder type units like a Digitech Talker. It seems the iVoxel has some of that mojo in it performing some resynthesis of your own voice before the vocoder section to make it clearer. I also like that you can record your own voice and use a few samples spread over the keys. How many iPads are we going to want on stage with us?
“Voxel is a combination of a voice optimized synthesizer and a vocoder. The vocoder part is based on the Matrix vocoder from VirSyn used by many famous artists – one of them the well known german group Kraftwerk. The channel filters used by iVoxel are based on the Sennheiser Vocoder VSM201 resulting in a rich and fat analogue sound characteristic.” – virsyn.net/mobileapp
For more info: virsyn.net/mobileapp
This entry was written by , posted on July 23, 2010 at 6:14 am, filed under iPad and tagged iPad, iPhone, iVoxel, robot, speech synthesizer, Virsyn, vocal, vocoder, voice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’m in the process of moving from Berlin to New York and all the packing is making me feel like a robot. What I thought would take two days has become four and the work is all repetitive. If I only had my own robot to do this stuff for me. At least some of these songs are keeping my feet tapping.
“And she has a gay relationship with our television set.” – Say Hi to Your Mom
For those interested the move will change me from renter to landlord and yes I will be building an all new studio! Stay tuned…
I created this playlist at Grooveshark. My profile there is: thingstocome
This entry was written by , posted on November 23, 2008 at 1:58 am, filed under music and tagged Add N to X, Herbie Hancock, robot, Say Hi to Your Mom, songs, Styx, Sunday Sounds. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Have you ever used a speech synthesizer in your music? I’ve used a 1970′s Texas Instruments Speak & Spell, Apple computer’s built in MacInTalk text to speech synthesizer, Magnavox Odyssey² video game peripheral “The Voice”, AT&T’s “Natural Voices” for telephony, Commodore Amiga’s “Soft Voice” synthesizer and a handful of other talk making algorithms.
You can hear synthetic voices in a lot of popular music. Most recently Benni Benassi’s song Satisfaction highlights Apple’s MacInTalk speech synthesizer.
In my own music I sometimes have the synthetic voice mirror the last few words in a verse acting as a robotic backup singer. In my live version of the song “One Night in NYC” I have a synthetic female voice tell her side of the dark story. I recorded a futuristic minimal track with German producer Miro Pajic titled “Gigabytes Numbers” and the last minute of the song a male synthetic voice with a British accent rambles gibberish and well large numbers. To increase the futuristic effect on his voice we put it through a TC Electroinc’s Filtrator plug-in and then automated some delay effect times using Ableton Live’s standard Ping Pong Delay plug-in. Here’s an audio sample:
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Here are a few online places you can go right now and create some synthetic voices:
What’s next? Software that creates real singing vocals of course. Yamaha’s Vocaloid software takes a stab at it but the technology really is not ready for prime time. However, I could see using Vocaloid for interesting sounds. You can jump over to Sound on Sound Magazine to hear a sample.
Keep in mind we are not “talking” about vocoding in this article. Vocoding uses a carrier signal and a real human voice and will be a subject of a different post in the future. For a current stream of updated info on Text to Speech check out the Text to Speech blog!
photo credits: redomestication and inju
This entry was written by , posted on October 27, 2007 at 5:15 am, filed under plug-ins, song writing and tagged lyrics, robot, speech synthesizer, vocals. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
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