Voice Fonts
Sunday, November 23rd, 2003 at 8:16 amGeorge from Walnut Creek points us at the NY Times: Could I Get That Song in Elvis, Please? (free registration required) which discusses Yamaha’s VOCALOID technology. Basically, a vocalist’s sound font.
Probably the most realistic quote in this article was the producer that envisioned a future recording session like this:
vowels and all your consonants and I’ll see you later.
We’ll see if a set of voice fonts authored at a university lab or a Yamaha clean room will be enough to make this a popular technology. Opening up the means to create the fonts is essential. Unfortunately:
oops.
[UPDATE] The Yamaha site makes you download a random audio player (in Japanese?). So as a service I captured two of the samples here as MP3s:
On hearing these I think maybe we’ve jumped the gun just a little… I don’t think the Bart announcer is quite ready to take on a cotton field spiritual…
[Son of Update] Metafilter took a spin on this one, including an evisceration by ZD-Net in March.
November 24th, 2003 at 7:36 am
Vocaloid: Synthetic singer
Vocaloid is a new Yamaha product, coming in January 2004, that creates a synthetic singing voice and will retail for about $200. It appears to use a phoneme-assembly technique similar to the latest sp..
November 24th, 2003 at 7:48 am
Thanks for those MP3s, I flipped when I read the news, now I know I’m going to wait for a few years, until they make ‘em more Western-sounding.
November 25th, 2003 at 10:39 pm
Well, I’ll be dadgummed.
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