Vocaloid wins Electronic Musician magazine's EDITOR'S CHOICE AWARD for Innovation

We are please to announce that Electronic Musician Magazine (USA) has awarded their coveted annual EDITOR'S CHOICE AWARD in the category of Innovation to VOCALOID!


“One of the most distinctive synthesis applications to come along in a while”

Yamaha has raised the bar on vocal synthesis with its Vocaloid technology, now playing in software from Zero-G. Lola and Leon (and the recently released Miriam) incorporate Yamaha’s unique new approach to synthesizing realistic vocal parts. Each of the programs offers a library of phonemes (speech building blocks) that are based on real acoustic-voice samples. But this is no ordinary sample library: the tools for adjusting the synthetic voice are like none you’ll see elsewhere. If you have the inclination and some time on your hands, you can build your own synthetic language that your virtual singers can sing.

Lola and Leon allow you to enter notes on a multitrack sequencer-like interface, and then add text as you would in a notation program. Once you have finished the notes and text, you can turn to a number of “expression” parameters to add realism to your virtual vocalist. At the bottom of the main screen are settings for standard parameters such as note Velocity and Pitch Bend, but when’s the last time you saw Noise, Harmonics, Brightness, or Gender Factor settings? Each of the latter group can make a signigicant impact on the voice’s timbre and can vary over time either note by note or throughout the length of an entire phrase.

Real vocalists use vibrato, and with Vocaloid, you can create exacting amplitude envelopes containing dozens and dozens of breakpoints for each individual note. You can also employ a variety of preset or custom attacks, crescendo and diminuendo marks, and dynamics. If you really want to get to the heart of the matter, the Phoneme Editor provides access to the individual syllables that are used to generate a vocal part, and there are numerous ways to alter the program’s operation as it renders your music and lyrics into synthetic speech.

It’s not trivial to get a realistic voice part using a Vocaloid program, and we’d like to see a more up-to-date interface for the software. There’s no way to enter notes in real time (using a MIDI controller, for example), and a lot of trial and error is required to make a voice sound expressive. But that shouldn’t stop you from exploring one of the most distinctive synthesis applications to come along in a while.

News Source : Zero-G