I’ve been testing the new Yamaha Omnivocal plugin (public beta) together with Cubase Pro 15, and I’m quite impressed so far. However, I’ve noticed that some English words are not articulated properly — or not at all.
For example, words like “ambition” or “decision” seem to break the synthesis; Omnivocal just skips or mangles them completely.
Has anyone else run into this?
Are there any known word lists, phoneme maps, or workarounds to get these words pronounced correctly (e.g., through phonetic spelling or alternative input)?
That suggests you should be able to enter phonetic symbols directly. Section 5.3 provides the English phonetic symbol table. It looks like you enter the phonetic spellings within square brackets. Based on that, I’d guess you’d enter “decision” as either “[d iy] [s ih] [zh ah n]” or “[d ih] [s ih] [zh ah n]”, depending on whether you pronounce the first syllable with a long “e” or short “i” sound, respectively.
I haven’t tried using Omnivocal yet, but I figured it this might be possible because I seem to recall being able to do it with Yamaha’s Vocaloid when I tried that a bit over 20 years ago. The “accent” Vocaloid had at that time in speaking English was decidedly not typical of an American or British speaker.
Thanks a lot for the quick and detailed response, Rick.
I completely overlooked that section in the manual — good catch! I’ll experiment with the phonetic input syntax you mentioned and see if Omnivocal handles “decision” and similar words more reliably that way.
Appreciate the insight and the historical reference to Vocaloid as well — that actually makes perfect sense.
Yeah, I tried it yesterday and the pronounciation reminded me of The Hungarian Phrasebook skit, for those who remember. ”My hovercraft is full of eels” kinda.
In the case of “remember”, I’ve found that Omnivocal can often break words into syllables correctly, as long as there are the same number of syllables and notes. The key, though, is you don’t select all the notes, you just enter the word on the note that will be the first syllable. There are no doubt also words it doesn’t do right, but I’d think “remember” should be one it could do. One that was a problem for me was “our” which we Americans tend to pronounce as one-syllable (similar to “are” – but, even if more like “hour”, it would just be a dipthong not an extra syllable), but Omnivocal broke into two syllables. I ended up replacing that with “are” in my test case.
You’ll need some fanagling to get some words out or settle for certain compromises already pointed as Omnivocal lacks certain IPA phonemes which are necessary to produce words in English and other languages. The phonemes provided seem to only give complete coverage to Japanese.
