Vocal recordings from XML! Cantamus

Has anyone seen this, or tried it with Dorico exports??

Hereā€™s a quick demo. I uploaded a basic XML to Cantemus: literally just simple notes and lyrics, no tweaking. This is the result I got.

I think this is pretty remarkable, considering what it is. And considering that I did absolutely no work on the file beyond inputting notes and lyrics.

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Never heard of this before. Iā€™m blown away by the fact that the rendition is intelligible and palatable. Makes all the effort I go to on my channel seem almost hard to justify.

Iā€™m currently uploading a five-part acappella arrangement of mine to test it. Shoot, itā€™s really, really good.

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When theyā€™ll have a VST, itā€™s goodbye to Wordbuilder and suchā€¦

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Damn! What do they use to achieve this? :astonished:

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Thereā€™s obviously some machine learning going on, and they mention creating models of real singersā€™ voices (sounds like Matthew Curtis is one; heā€™s not my favorite, but heā€™s everywhere, so I canā€™t say Iā€™m surprised).

Well of course! It would seem a very evolved form of the East West Symphonic Choirs ā€¦ interesting! It would be great to have it as a VST that you can use in Dorico ā€¦ :thinking: :slightly_smiling_face:

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I suspect that to create a VST they would need to host it standalone and employ a delay just like Noteperformer.

Emvoice One is another means of adding sung words to MIDI. It can work in Dorico but is a more comfortable fit with Cubase, since Dorico cannot yet send tempo information back to its VSTā€™s. Thus Emvoice piano roll does not line up with Dorico bar lines.

Letā€™s say that more than anything else it is a hope for the future :grin: ā€¦ but apparently the technology runs fast and maybe ā€¦ :man_shrugging:

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The technology runs fast, but the challenge is considerable and has a long way to go. That is already true of simulating live playing of instruments, and adding pronunciation and appropriate emphasis of lyrics is only more varied and thus difficult. I am just glad to see several companies working on this and am impressed with the progress being made on such a difficult challenge.

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Of course ā€¦ I am well aware of the difficulties ā€¦ for now I would ā€œsettleā€ for an update of the Symphonic Choirs East West, which at the moment if Iā€™m not mistaken is the only vst that can handle words in a satisfactory way ā€¦ .

OF the players that offer lyrics for choral sounds, EW seems the one I have heard the most about. Have not tried it yet.

The thing is, all those take a lot of work. This is literally just plug and play. Absolutely zero extra fiddling.

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Just tried this out and it is quite amazing. Iā€™m very impressedā€¦miles better than the Emvoice One renditions that I have heard. Certainly itā€™s not a choir sound, rather single voices, but I will experiment with rendering the individual voices, capturing them and trying to layer them to create more of a multiple voice per part sound. They really need to create a plugin! A DAW will be the only way to assemble all the parts, but you can absolutely understand the words. The EW choirs are indeed quite fiddly to get a good result, but it is currently the best thing we have for choir renditions. I also have Dominus Choir Pro from Fluffy Audio which is a beautiful sound, but has limited word creation. Good for Latin but not so much for English. Cantimus is certainly very encouraging for the future.

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Of course, because itā€™s not meant for choir renditions.
Itā€™s meant for individual practice, as it says.

A plug-in is not feasible, though. Rendering can take as long as 30 minutes for one piece. Not sure how they would adapt the engine for real-time playback.

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Yes, Iā€™m realizing that as I look into this further. As far as creating a choir is concerned, I rendered the same small vocal line four times, using a different voice for each pass. Even the bass voice singing a soprano line is useable it seems. I put them into Cubase and offset the tracks slightly, even though there was no initial phasing - each rendering is different. The result is pretty good. Using this method I can easily create an SATB choir with four voices on each part. The problem is the number of creditā€™s available using their subscription model - particularly as this is not how the service was intended to be used, as Mark pointed out! Iā€™m sure that if the subscription model was changed to allow the purchase of extra credits as they were needed, this would be a very successful venture. I have written to them to ask for a different payment model that composerā€™s could use. Iā€™m happy to pay for credits in order to render my own music, but right now there is a yearly limit as I understand it, and I think I will quickly need more for the chamber oratorio that I am currently writing.

You donā€™t have to have a bass voice sing the soprano line! You can select which voice is assigned to each staff at import.