DaddyO wrote:Yes, people seem to like this much more up-to-date library, Surfwhammy. They have produced video overviews of their product as well.
The videos and audio clips are intriguing and, as explained below, I like the phonetic keyboard strategy, but at present this software is not something I can afford, so I check on it every so often and ponder the idea of using it sometime . . . GaryExo wrote:Interesting, Surfwhammy. Thanks. I didn't know of this library at all. I have to say the demos don't sound good to me but I suspect it's the fault of the use of a terrible reverb which gives everything an almost metallic sheen. Very unrealistic. I also hate the GUI. I can appreciate what they're trying to do with it but I don't like the look. It also looks to me as if it would be just as tricky to use as EWQLSC. Do you use this, Surfwhammy?
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NOTE: I do not have these products, but I have been pondering them for a while, and I like the information I have found. They are a bit outside of my current budget, but "Soloists of Prague" is not so expensive . . . ]
THOUGHTSI have been doing research for a long time on various systems for transcribing vocal sounds, where "stenography" is the more formal name and "shorthand" is the colloquial name, with the general idea being to use a set of phonemes and corresponding symbols to represent vocalizations very rapidly, essentially recording on paper with pencil at the same speed as the vocalizations are uttered, and in most systems this is done using different types of symbols, acronyms, abbreviations, and so forth, some of which are called "speed graphs" . . .
Texting is a type of stenography, as is Morse Code, although more so when enhanced with special codes, acronyms, and abbreviations . . .
This aspect is important when one is considering systems for music vocalizations, because in contrast to musical instruments, voices have not only (a) the standard qualities of musical instruments (pitch, duration, and so forth) but also (b) the additional set of language qualities, and the latter requires a vocabulary, which is the way vocalizing musical software and stenography are related . . .
In other words, vocalizing musical software needs to have a language, and I like the phonetic language provided by the VIRHARMONIC products, which is more of a phonetic alphabet than a language, per se . . .
No matter how it is done, you need to know how things sound, where an example is the Latin word "eccelsis", which when sung literally is virtually indecipherable in a cathedral that has vast reverberation, hence the strategy to sing "egg-shell-sea-us", even though the "-us" part makes no obvious phonetic sense . . .
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NOTE: If you listen carefully starting at approximately 1:48 in the following YouTube music video, the purpose of the "-us" part is easier to understand, where the key bit of information is that it is sung very rapidly. . . ]
"Gloria in Eccelsis Deo" (Mozart) ~ YouTube music videoIn some respects, vocalists tend to sing phonemes, but instead of working directly with phonemes I think it is easier and more logical to work with the primitive units provided by a phonetic alphabet, which is where the phonetic alphabet of the VIRHARMONIC products becomes intriguing, since it provides a tailored keyboard style metaphor for creating phonemes, where the key design aspect is avoiding abstractions, which explained another way maps to everything sounding accurate in the sense of "what you see is what you hear" . . .
The difficult aspect is that words do
not always sound the way they are written in formal English, and this aspect requires devoting a bit of attention to discovering how to write words the way they are heard, which is where the phonetic alphabet of the VIRHARMONIC products becomes very important . . .
It might be a bit slow at first, but (a) music notation is a bit slow at first and (b) the reality is that specifying stuff accurately requires attention to detail . . .
My perspective on the various videos and audio samples at the VIRHARMONIC website is that they were
not done with a calibrated full-range studio monitor system, so unless you have the same studio monitor system, the singing will not sound so clear, but I think this is a matter of producing, mixing, and mastering rather than a problem with the actual sampled sounds and engine . . .
I think everything is there, but you need to be able to hear it accurately when producing, mixing, and mastering to get it to sound realistic; and there also is the matter of styles and the ways certain types of singing are "expected" to be heard, where as a general rule nearly all digitally sampled choral stuff basically sounds to me like "blah, blah, blah . . . " with respect to being even remotely clear and easy to understand as a mapping to actual words, although this is strongly dependent upon genres and how familiar or unfamiliar they might be, where part of the problem with some types of choral music is that the language is Latin, which will not make a lot of sense when it is an unfamiliar language . . .
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NOTE: This is a stellar example of things sounding different from the way they are written . . . ]
"Bo Peep" (T-ARA) ~ YouTube music videoAs noted, I do
not have the Virharmonic products, but I know a good bit about stenographic systems, music production software, and so forth; and I am intrigued by the Virharmonic products, because the things that I consider to be important appear to be present, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous!