Artificial Vocals

[Sonic Tech Support]

Me and a mate have done a guitar cover of an 80s goth song, but we've put artificial vocals to it using text-to-speech and Melodyne to stretch the duration and pitch of the words. It was recorded on Cubase. The vocals initially had loads of artefacts due to the stretching and pitch shifting, so we've had to drown these out with loads of over-the-top distortion. The link is here if anyone is interested. The song is 'Alice' by Sonic Tech Support. It doesn't sound too good, but I think it sounds pretty human. Has anyone else had any luck at producing human sounding artificial vocals? Sonic Tech Support.

https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds?q= ... %20support

[garryknight]

You did a good job drowning out the vocals. I can't make them out at all. I tried this myself but using Studio One's sample transpose function initially. The results were so bad I found that I never found time to go back and experiment with Melodyne.

My next experiment in this direction, which I still haven't got around to yet, is to create lyrics using Realitone's Blue - which will be (perfectly) in tune but some of the vowels will be wrong - and play with the transients and some formant, pitch and volume shaping to try and give it some expression. Similar to the way some of the new functions in Vocaloid Editor 4 work. I'm not too hopeful, though.

Plus, it doesn't exactly fit the definition of "artificial vocals" as Blue was created with a large set of samples from a very human singer.

With your 80s goth piece, I would have thought you'd get better results shouting the lyrics yourself, then hacking at them with Melodyne.

[sig-ex]

"Human sounding" and "artificial" are a bit opposites, so I'm not sure whether this could help. I'm wondering whether you could achieve something similar with Plogue's Alter/Ego or Chipspeech? These plug-ins can "sing" so you wouldn't have to go through Melodyne.