[sdiy] (OT) VOCALOID vocal synthesis

[Rainer Buchty]

While not DIY at all but since voice synthesis pops up from time to
time... I just stumbled across this:

http://www.global.yamaha.com/news/20030304b.html

The "technical" part of the announcement reads like this:

\begin{quote}

VOCALOID uses Frequency-Domain Singing Articulation Splicing and Shaping,
a vocal (singing-voice) synthesizing system developed by Yamaha.

With this system, the singing articulations (collections of voice
snippets, such as of syllables, and snippets of vocal expression
variations like vibrato) needed to reproduce vocals are collected from
custom-produced recordings of accomplished singers and put into a database
after conversion into frequency domains.

To synthesize vocal parts, the system retrieves data consisting of voice
snippets, applies pitch conversion, and splices and shapes them to form
the words of a song as input by the user. As this processing is done at
the frequency-domain level, pitch can be easily changed according to the
specified melody, and the voice snippets can be spliced in a way that
reproduces smooth-flowing words.

\end{quote}

Makes me wonder, what use the music industry will make of this
technology.

Rainer