More re singing synth...

Re synthetic singing voices. The state of the art has progressed quite a
way in the last few years. Circa 1991, I was fortunate enough to try out
Perry Cook's "Shiela" on the NeXT box:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~prc/SingingSynth.html
Sounded cool, but it had no musical interface at all.

While Cantor and some other products are very pricy, Myriad has Harmony
Assistant with "Virtual Singer" -- a fairly decent sounding product for
$90. It's hard to beat:

http://www.myriad-online.com/en/products/index.htm

BTW, I downloaded and tried Harmony Assistant with Virtual Singer, and
read a few things about the tuning capability. Looks pretty interesting. It
has a limitation of + or - 2 semitones in the tuning of each note, but it
does understand enharmonics, so it looks like you could tune, for example,
17-tET and use A# and B-flat as different pitches. Has its own internal
tuning system. They have a meantone example.

Another cool thing about Harmony Assistant... I have Finale 2005, which
can export a "Music XML" rendition of scores. I saved an XML of a song with
ensemble accompaniment from Finale, then loaded the XML into Harmony
Assistant, and the transition was "almost perfect". Then I listened to
*words and music* in H.A. The next experiment would be trying to use an
alternative tuning, like meantone or harmonic scale. (If anyone's done it,
please let me know what you think!)

On the Myriad forum for Virtual Singer, I did start some Q/A on
microtuning (loading Scala or TUN files) and VST possibilities. People
might be interested in chiming in, if they think the product has
possibilities. Here:

http://www.myriad-online.com/cgi-bin/bbs/YaBB.pl?board=Scores;action=display;num=1104875104

They're open to community "voting" on features to add, and they seem to
listen. There is some interest in turning Virtual Singer into a VSTi (which
would be awesome), and also importing Scala files.

Rick