Re: vocal synthesis and processing

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Erdem Helvacioglu <erdemhel@tnn.net> wrote:
> i was wondering which softwares and hardwares are especially good for 
>vocal
> synthesis and processing. should i use the kyma system? or would 
>metasynth,
> soundhack, csound, msp, audiomulch be enough?

I've been using Metasynth 4 for vocal processing and think it is
powerful enough. There is also the aspect of available time for
learning the tools. The less applications you use the better you will
get at using them and the faster you will become in trying out
different ideas of yours to find what works with your vision.
Metasynth is not yet fully compatible with Leopard, so over here I
keep an old G5 mac running Tiger for that purpose. Metasynth is not
real-time, meaning you bounce audio to disc and work on the sound file
in Metasynth. For this work-flow to be fast and creative you need a
good host application DAW where you compose, compile the sounding
parts and finalize the mix. I use Logic for that but Audiomuch should
work well, maybe better because you already know it so well. The trick
with Metasynth is to learn all of what you can do to sound in
Metasynth and in your host DAW - only that way you can work over the
non real-time gap. But that's not a biggie, cause composers have been
using pure imagination as their main tools for ages. In praxis it
comes down to how much time you have to mess around with the tools to
learn them and build up your "composer's vocabulary".

Since you bring up Apple boxes (Mettasynth) you have to also check out
the free AU plug-ins by composer Micheal NOrris:
http://www.michaelnorris.info/software.html
They are real-time, meaning you open them on a channel and run audio
through them. They can give the same type of "granular processing
sound" to voices as Metasynth.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com