Voice synth for PowerMacs (VocalWriter 1.0)

Hello Everyone,

For all you PowerMac users ,here's something you may not know about :
VocalWriter 1.0 ,software synth that sings (multitimbral & polyphonic)!
and writes
AIFF files. Includes a GM synth.

>With the recent development of its breakthrough acoustic modeling
> technology called Resonant Articulatory Synthesis (RAS), KAE Labs
> offers the first musical instrument that can model the human vocal
> tract in singing unrestricted English lyrics.

A 15 day trial fully functioning demo is available for download
(4MB compressed file). $100 to register.
Go to

Cheers,
Drew

I've worked in the area of computer music synthesis for a number of years and
have had the experience of being somewhat limited in the tuning accuracy which
I could achieve. I believe that the difference between being able to set a
pitch to within plus or minus 1 cent and being able to set that pitch to
within plus or minus 0.1 cent could in some cases spell the difference between
achieving a really powerful musical effect - a striking clarity of harmony,
for example, and being "just on the edge" of achieving that effect but being
unable to fully take advantage of it. In fact, I suspect that many musicians
would find themselves frequently frustrated by a limitation in tuning accuracy
to plus or minus 1 cent, and actually prevented from being able to fully
realize in actual music the real potential in their musical ideas.

There is a paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 24
No. 6 published in November 1952 by J. Donald Harris entitled: "Pitch
Discrimination". He tested three subjects with great numbers of repetitions
and found that for sine tones at 2000 Hz the minimum frequency changes for
which the subjects, with extensive practice, could distinguish between a step
up in frequency and a step down in frequency were 2.4 cents for subject 1, 1.7
cents for subject 2, and 1.3 cents for subject 3. For sine tones at 1000 Hz
and 500 Hz, the sensitivity was lower.

These are results for pure sine tones. For musical timbres and especially
when notes are playing together and there may be beating effects which a
musician would want to control accurately in order to produce the best
possible sound, it would stand to reason that changing note frequencies by
very small amounts - well under one cent - could in some cases greatly affect
the effect created by the combination of musical tones sounding together.

Dave Hill La Mesa, CA

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End of TUNING Digest 1446
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