Singing computer voices with Kontakt

[cropleyb]

In the last few days, I created a piece called "Alive", which you can listen to on SoundCloud at

The voices are computer voices, and they are singing about how good it is to be alive.

 

How did I do it? First, I created some notes for the voices to sing using Band In A Box, choosing a style that would generate some MIDI notes that I could more easily use later, and dumped them into a Logic project.

 

Next, I wrote some lyrics that would fit the melody notes, and generated some audio files. To get the computer voices to sing words of my choosing, I used the "say" utility in Mac OS X (9.1.7, but it is probably very similar with other versions). See http://mac.tutsplus.com/tutorials/os-x/give-your-mac-a-voice-with-text-to-speech/ for some instructions for how to do this (from the Delving Deeper section onwards) This gave me some voices speaking my lyrics, but I wanted to make them "sing".

 

The next part was to set the timing of the voices to that of the notes generated by Band In A Box. I used a combination of editing techniques in Logic (my DAW): flex time, region splitting and moving, and region stretching. This phase of the project took the most time, especially as I wanted three singing voices, and they all spoke with a different timing emphasis. After this stage, I had them speaking in time to the music.

 

The next part was to get them to sing. I used the technique described at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtEoB9SqUoI. Basically, Native Instruments' Kontakt has a "Tone Machine" mode that you can use to control the pitch of any sound with your own MIDI notes.

I followed the advice in the video, and added some vibrato to them. I just used a constant amount and rate per voice to make it easy - I was more concerned by understandability than realism.

 

The voices were still very hard to understand, so I added "Big Ralph" speaking some lyrics after each line for the first chorus.

I hope that helps someone