We’ve seen several attempts to create ‘virtual singers’ in the past, one of which - Yamaha’s Vocaloid - has pretty much inspired its own music-making genre. It’s been a while since it felt like there was any kind of next-gen product, though, so the digital stage could be set for Emvoice to make an impact.
The company comprises a small team of “coders and audio experts,” and it’s currently putting the finishing touches to Emvoice One, its first vocal synthesis plugin. Currently available in beta for PC and Mac, this is designed for creating both lead and background vocals.
Check out the tutorial above and you’ll see that it’s certainly intuitive, enabling you to program your vocal melodies on a familiar piano roll style interface. Adding lyrics is easy, too; type phrases underneath the notes and they’ll quickly be sung back to you.
Crucially, there’s also plenty of editing potential. A large dictionary of words is included, but you can construct any that aren’t using phonemes. You can also add ornaments - these enable you to add, among other things, pitch bends between notes that should result in greater realism.
Ultimately, though, it’s all about the end result, and, to our ears, the Emvoice One demos sound good enough to suggest that the plugin could succeed. Sure, it’s probably not going to be suitable for use on a power ballad, but with some judicious processing, we can certainly see it finding favour in the electronic music-making community.
Let’s not forget that many of today’s EDM vocals have an artificial quality to them, anyway, so ‘realism’ isn’t going to be an issue for many producers.
Find out more on the Emvoice website.
