[DECtalk] another creation
Ulysses Garcia
birdlover2002 at hotmail.com
Tue Feb 4 02:05:56 EST 2014
Hi everybody: Today, I will be showing you some ground-breaking
discoveries many of you thought would never come. But it was my
perseverance and patience that did it, and collaboration with other
people who were like me but who lacked motivation in some ways. Now, I
am trying to reach out to as many blind people, whom I know have a major
interest in singing synthesisers, that there is a way after all, a way
that many, including myself would never be here. Sometimes I ask for
directions, but the person giving it to me does not give me detailed
step-by-step documentation-style directions, which has lead me to be
hampered with all of the work. Soon I discovered this new method and now
I am sharing it. Sadly, there has been very little enthusiasm throughout
the forums to which I am subscribed to.
I first remember being fascinated with singing synthesisers back in June
of 2007. I did not know much about linguistics at that time, neither did
I know about music notation. I just learned how to make Dec talk sing
using my knowledge of time and note and after understanding phonemes I
cranked out quite a number of songs. Then I learnt how to harmonise and
then two years later I learned how to back-mask with phonemes.
Eventually though I came across speech synthesisers that sounded much
better than Dec talk that somehow made me feel that Dec talk was now
inferior because it sounded so bright where as the others sounded dark.
The first one that I really liked was Vocal Writer, and I was doing
research on it. Unfortunately, however, it was meant for the Macintosh.
So I put that in my to do list, and when I found a Mac I could work
with, I installed Vocal Writer. Then I found out that Voice-over was not
working well with it, so I asked about it. It turned out that two people
learned how to use it. Hugh Emerson and Flint Million. However, there
were no links to these external resources, so I was stumped. At that
same time, however, I learned about Vocaloid, and I remember trying to
find a way to get a hold of it. Eventually I gave that up and I assumed
it was going to be only in Japanese. Then, in 2013, I finally found
away to obtain Vocaloid, and for about four months I kind of did not use
it until I got a hunch that lead me to try something. Apparently someone
said you had to have someone select the first note for you before you
could insert lyrics. Well, what if you selected all? So I tried that and
sure enough, it worked perfectly. But guess what? I was surprised that I
was not even excited. Maybe because I knew it was right there, but have
not yet figured it out? I knew I learned ow to make eloquence sing based
on learning and my creativity, and someone helped me how to make Orpheus
sing, but I lost interest in those right a way. But with this, it will
be something I will be using for a long time.
Soon after my big discovery, I spent one week exactly turning a lot of
my MIDI collections into real songs. And this struck me as funny because
a few days before this, someone posted on the Dec talk mailing list that
they heard of a MIDI to Dec talk converter. I knew there was no such
thing because now we already know how Vocaloid and Vocal Writer and
Flinger work. So, now I am willing to share the directions with anyone
who is interested and I hope we can recruit more blind people and renew
the enthusiasm.
After you read the below steps, you will finally learn how to make
Vocaloid sing just about anything you wanted to. Note that Vocaloid
Editor 3 only provides the voices. To mix in instruments you will need
some kind of a sound editor. You will also need this if you are to make
choral pieces of some sort.
To begin, use a midi sequencer like Quick Windows Sequencer. Make sure
the notes are precisely timed with the metronome though, or else you
will have to normalise with Vocaloid. Not only that but Vocaloid will
count any irregular notes in your song and this can mess up your project.
Once you set up your MIDI roll, open Vocaloid and when you open a file,
choose Vocaloid MIDI from the files of type drop down menu list. Locate
the file and press enter. A list of tracks will appear. Check only one
and do not bother with any of the others. Before adding lyrics, you will
need to press space to play, and when it tells you that there are
overlapping notes, go to the jobs menu and press enter on normalise.
Next, go to the edit menu, and find the select all. Alternatively, press
control+A. This will select all the notes in the musical editor window,
which is where you need to be or else this will not work. Once you have
done this, go back to the jobs menu and find the insert lyrics item.
When an edit multi-line appears, you will see "oh ooh ooh" depending on
how many notes there are. Note that each ooh represents one syllable
tied to that note, so if you had a word that had more than one you would
have to separate them using dashes. You cannot write any nonsense words
because it will check the dictionary.
Lyrical notation: For those of you who are music Braille readers or just
musicians in general, this might be easy to understand. A syllable is
simply a combo of vowel and consonants like this 'word' in single
quotes. When a word is more than one syllable and it evenly ties to
notes, you or Vocaloid will put dashes, like this. Hel- lo I am
des-cri-bing how to write ly-rics with Voca-loid. For words that stretch
across multiple notes such as in the example Angels we have heard on
High in the word Gloria, you will have to find your own-fill-in for now,
but do not use dashes for this. Also make sure your MIDI file has the
right number of notes for each syllable. Some people try to hush a
two-syllable word into one note that is tied only to find out that it
does not work, so instead, separate them with MIDI and try again.
Vocaloid is pretty good at analysing words though, and if you want you
can use phonemes if you are dealing with a tricky word Vocaloid cannot
pronounce or if you want to be really accurate.
Once you have finished, check the song to make sure you have the words
right. This may take time and I nearly gave up on it. After you
finished, save the VSQX to your hard drive, and then you can export the
result as a wave file.
From now on, you will have to repeat the above steps if you want to do
the same thing to the other tracks. Eventually you will want to
establish a suffix for each wave file you are working with so you can
mix them later.
Note: To change voices, press control+tab to go to the track editor,
press control+a to select all parts, press alternate+p for parts menu,
and up arrow for part properties. Depending on how many voices you have
installed, you can select which voice you would like to use for that
part. After selecting your voice press enter. You will have to
experiment with really slow work-arounds, like mixing and rendering. It
is a pain, but this is the best method that does not require any other
form. And as always, you can experiment on your own, to learn how to
make Vocaloid sound more human. These include things like adding breath
sounds, portamentos, vibratos, and more.
Now that I am a pro, it takes me about five to ten minutes to write up a
short song. I hope you found these directions simple to read and feel
free to ask any questions. I am sure that from this point on,
experimentation will be entirely up to you to be creative in the long
run. I know I did.
On 2/3/2014 1:18 PM, Jayson Smith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Can someone send me the manual for using Vocaloid as a blind person? I
> don't have it, but I'm always interested in things like this. Also,
> how much does it cost?
> Jayson
>
> On 2/2/2014 12:26 PM, Jake McMahan wrote:
>> Let me elaborate a little. It's very accessible and I think mr.
>> Garcia deserves the credit for showing us how to use such a
>> groundbreaking piece of technology. He and I might use different
>> sound editors and stuff, but he's a lot better at it then I am. The
>> only problem with vocaloid is it is very big, and each english voice
>> can range from 400 mb to 1 gb.
>>
>> -----Original Message----- From: Jayson Smith
>> Sent: Sunday, February 02, 2014 12:17 PM
>> To: DECtalk Discussions
>> Subject: Re: [DECtalk] another creation
>>
>> Wo, there *is* a way to accessibly use Vocaloid? Just to be clear, is
>> this workable for people who are totally blind?
>> Jayson
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: Ulysses Garcia <birdlover2002 at hotmail.com>
>> To: DECtalk Discussions <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com>
>> Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2014 00:15:25 -0800
>> Subject: Re: [DECtalk] another creation
>>
>>> It's actually Vocaloid, and hadn't it been for my inspiration, the
>>> creator would not have known how to make it. I sent out the manual on
>>> how to use it in an accessible format, but it seemed no one was
>>> interested.
>>> On 2/1/2014 11:48 PM, Tyler wrote:
>>> > That sounds like it could be Vocaloid or something similar with
>>> vocoder > voices!
>>> > Tyler Z
>>> > On Sat, 1 Feb 2014 23:29:26 -0500, Jake McMahan wrote:
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >
>>> >> Hey people:
>>> >> Check out this funny little piece that I wrote to pick on my
>>> cousin >> shaneâEUR^(TM)s
>>> >> inteligence levil.
>>> >>
>>> >>
>>> >> _______________________________________________
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>>> >> DECtalk at bluegrasspals.com
>>> >> http://bluegrasspals.com/mailman/listinfo/dectalk
>>>
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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