VirSyn has released Cantor 1.5, a completely revised version of their vocal synthesis application.

The upgrade makes it much easier to produce intelligible vocal lines. This is achieved with an improved filter model and a new kind of rule-based phoneme sequencer which adapts the phoneme transitions according to the context inside a word.

Cantor’s main purpose is to provide you with creative vocal parts for live and studio usage. Cantor is not designed to replace human singers but more the creation of new virtual character voices whose base sound can be influenced by the user in an extremely flexible manner.

Cantor goes beyond creating realistic “human” singers. Many parameters have no relation to human vocals like “Metallize” which turns the virtual singer more into a singing Gong. The voice editor allows you to edit the character of your virtual singer by defining the base spectrum for vowels and consonants.

The Phoneme editor gives you full access to the atoms of the vocal synthesis engine. With this editor you can define the formant structure and the noise characteristic of each phoneme used by the vocal engine.

A demo version of Cantor 1.5 is available:

• CANTOR Demo 1.5 Mac Version
• CANTOR Demo 1.5 PC Version

Features:

• 8 part vocal synthesis engine
• • plays lyrics in realtime
  • english phoneme dictionary (120000 words)
  • no samples used
  • score editor
  • voice editor
  • phoneme editor
• ° Realtime editing
• • Brightness
  • Humanize
  • Metallize
  • Gender factor
  • Vibrato
  • Breath noise
• ° Interfaces
• • stand alone mode
  • VST 2 / AudioUnit
  • ReWire / RTAS (Sept. 2004)
• ° Microtuning
• • Scala compatible microtuning

System requirements:

• Mac G4 > 400 Mhz
• PC Pentium III > 600 Mhz
• Athlon XP/MP
• 256 MB RAM
• Mac OX 10.2 / WinXP

For more information, visit the Virsyn site.