Who could have predicted that a small grey box would be able to record hundreds of audio tracks, put a tone-deaf singer in tune, or place a virtual symphony orchestra at our fingertips? We're used to this sort of technological miracle by now, but even so, it's hard not to feel a touch of Tomorrow's World-style wonderment about the advent of singing synthesizers.
Yamaha's Vocaloid technology, introduced last year, allows developers to sample the characteristic building blocks of a human voice and create a virtual vocalist, ready to sing anything you care to throw at him, her or it.
At this year's Frankfurt Musikmesse, meanwhile, innovative German soft-synth designers Virsyn gave the world its first glimpse of their take on the singing computer concept.
A mere four months later, the finished program is with us. Cantor bears a number of operational similarities to Vocaloid. It can operate either as a stand-alone application or a VST or Audio Units plug-in, with Rewire and RTAS support promised in a coming update; and even when used as a plug-in within a host sequencer, it employs its own piano-roll-style grid for note and lyric entry. There are, however, three fundamental differences between Cantor and Vocaloid.
First, Cantor is not based on samples. Instead, a morphing additive synthesis engine derived from Virsyn's Cube software synth is used to generate the 39 phonemes which Virsyn use to reproduce English speech or singing.
Each phoneme is created by passing an additive sound source through a formant filter, which morphs between a start and an end state. These filter responses are fully editable, and up to to six peaks and three troughs in the formant filter response can be specified as morph points.
The second crucial difference, which is a consequence of the first, is that unlike Vocaloid, Cantor is a true virtual instrument, which can be 'played' in real time from a MIDI keyboard. What's more, all changes to notes, lyrics and vocal timbre are made instantaneously, with no need to wait whilst a file is rendered, and all parameters can be MIDI controlled and automated within your sequencer.
The third key point of departure is a conceptual one. Whereas Vocaloid is intended to create realistic, human-sounding singing voices that could replace a real lead or backing vocalist without the listener being aware, Cantor belongs more to the realm of 'special effects' vocal tools such as vocoders, guitar talkers, ring modulators and Mellotron choirs.
Installation is straightforward, and the copy protection consists of a serial number which you enter when you first run the program.
Registering at Virsyn's web site is highly recommended, as it enables you to download the frequent updates, along with additional files such as example projects and new phoneme sets. Cantor 's user interface is almost identical whether you use the stand-alone or plug-in version, apart from a few minor features which I'll point out as they crop up.
Each instance of the program is eight-part multitimbral, but the parts are monophonic, so if you want Cantor to sing multi-part harmonies, you'll need to create each line separately. Editing duties are distributed between five screens, which are brought to the front using tabs at the left-hand side, with the bulk of your work being undertaken in the first Score window. This combines a fairly conventional piano-roll editor with control over the most important parameters used for adjusting the timbre of the synthesized voice.
Cantor's Voice editing page. The partial display in the top half of the window allows you to edit the additive source used to generate voiced phonemes such as vowels, whilst the noise transfer function below determines the frequency content of the noise used in generating unvoiced phonemes such as 't'. Getting started is pretty easy. You select the Pencil tool from the small array above the piano-roll and draw in a note of the required length.
When you let go of the mouse button, the text field above the note will turn yellow, indicating that you should now enter a word or syllable. As you do so, Cantor automatically translates it into the appropriate phoneme or combination thereof, optionally displaying the results below the note bar. A hyphen is used to tell Cantor that the following note should be treated as part of the same word.
The engine used to translate words into phonemes is licensed from Carnegie-Mellon University, and is remarkably good. In the entire time I used Cantor, the only cases I encountered where it didn't know the correct translation were with proper names, and even then it usually makes a good guess.
In practice, you quickly forget it's even there. If it does fail you, it's possible to edit phoneme data for each note directly, but unlike Vocaloid, Cantor doesn't offer any way of adding your own words to its dictionary. Other available editing tools include an Arrow tool for selecting and moving existing notes and an Eraser tool.
Scrolling and zooming are achieved as in Cubase SX by clicking and dragging in the ruler view; this works well enough, but I missed having scroll bars and clickable zoom settings too. Overall, anyone familiar with the basic concept of a piano-roll editor will find Cantor 's pretty straightforward to use, but one thing that gets annoying is that there are no keyboard shortcuts whatsoever.
Editing would be a lot faster if you could use key input to switch between the different tools, but as it is, you can't even use the backspace key to delete selected notes; nor can the QWERTY keyboard be used to zoom or scroll the screen, or nudge notes. Some plug-in formats do impose restrictions on keyboard input to plug-ins, so this is perhaps understandable in the plug-in versions of Cantor, but the stand-alone version is no different.
More superficially, it would be nice if selecting the Pencil or Eraser tools actually changed the shape of the cursor to a pencil or eraser; as it is, you just get an arrow, whichever tool is selected. I also encountered occasions when the Pencil tool didn't put the notes quite where I expected, but this wasn't a big problem in practice. Once you've entered some note and lyric data, you can use the transport buttons above the window to play it back; if you're using the plug-in version, you can also choose to slave Cantor to the host program's transport.
In this mode, Cantor still cycles through the lyrics as you play, but the pitch and timing of the notes you've entered into the piano-roll editor is ignored in favour of incoming MIDI data, whether it's coming directly from your keyboard or a MIDI track in your sequencer.
If you have the Legato button switched off, Cantor still uses the note lengths from the piano-roll editor, whilst engaging Legato mode means that each note is sustained until you let go of the key or play another note. When you're playing Cantor in this way you do have to be careful to leave gaps where a word ends in a consonant, as these consonants are triggered by the MIDI Note Off, and playing legato causes them to be missed out.
With 'pedal legato' mode set in the Voice editing page, it is possible to have Cantor sustain a single syllable over multiple MIDI notes by holding down the sustain pedal and playing legato. Having provided Cantor with some raw materials in the shape of lyrics and sequence data, you can begin to explore the voice-editing controls. Sensible user interface design means that you can do most of the editing you're likely to need using the dozen or so knobs at the left of the main Score editor. These include familiar parameters such as Volume, Glide portamento , Pan, and Vibrato Rate and Depth, plus a selection of slightly more unusual controls.
Of these, Ensemble provides a gentle chorus effect, whilst Bright allows you to adjust the amount of high-frequency content in the output and Humanise introduces elements of random variation in the pitching, volume and vibrato rate and depth, to offset the machine-like quality of the results. The Phoneme editing window displays the start and finish states of a morphing formant filter. You can draw transfer functions for each with the mouse, and place morph points to tell Cantor how to map the filter response between the two.
Four other controls have a deeper influence on the nature of the synthesized voice. Metallic, according to Virsyn, 'turns the vocal source from a harmonic, partial structure into an inharmonic, metallic one', with actual results not unlike a ring modulator. Balance adjusts the relative levels of voiced phonemes and unvoiced ones, which for most purposes means the balance between vowel sounds and soft consonants on the one hand, and sibilant and hard consonants such as 's' and 't' on the other.
Breath introduces breath noise into the sound, and Gender is perhaps the most fundamental control, covering the full spectrum from impossibly deep bass, through obviously male, female and child singer territory into areas previously inhabited only by the Smurfs and Kate Bush. All of these parameters can be automated if you're using Cantor within a suitable plug-in host, and most can also be automated within Cantor 's Score editor itself, so there's plenty of scope for variation even within a single vocal phrase.
A nice touch is that when you hover the mouse over a control, its name disappears to be replaced by a numeric readout for that parameter.
If you want to get more deeply involved in shaping the vocal sound, you need to head for the Voice editing page.
Here you'll find two graphical windows in which you can 'draw' by clicking and moving the mouse. The upper window defines the spectrum of the additive source that is to be passed through Cantor 's formant filters, whilst the lower one specifies a transfer function ie. EQ shape for the breath noise. These use the same click-and-drag drawing method as Virsyn's Cube additive synth, which is about as easy to use as it gets.
As on the Score editor, further parameters are available for control at the left of the screen. You can specify the number of partials to be generated by the additive source — using more partials increases the sound quality but also the CPU load — and the corner frequencies of a high- and a low-shelving filter.
Less familiar parameters include Blur, which makes Cantor sing in a Mockney accent, and Noise Mod, which determines the extent to which the noise is related in timbre to the pitch of the note; at low values, it's pure noise, but as you increase the dial, the noise acquires more of a pitched quality.
Imagine entering your lyrics in plain english and then 'sing' your lyrics instantly just by playing the melody on your MIDI Keyboard. The completely reworked score editor makes it easy and fast to edit the most important sound parameters which give you access to the finest detail of spelling and expressivity of the vocal line.
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