Our contact at Zero-G hooked us up with some samples of their new Vocaloid Prima, a virtual vocalist modeled on the voice of a professional soprano opera singer, and powered by Yamaha’s VOCALOID2 Singing Synthesis Technology.

Hit the MP3 player button below and you can check out the bizarre robo-realism of this state of the art virtual vocalist while we tell you how it works.

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Prima is a virtual female vocalist modelled on the voice of a professional soprano singer. The soprano’s voice was sampled, analyzed and resynthesized so that you can put together words and notes in arbitrary order.

In addition to singing any words or combination of syllables or phonemes you can imagine, Prima will spread any sustained vowel (or voiced consonant) across as many notes as you like, with perfect legato. You can select from several different natural vibrato types and drag and drop your chosen type to any note or notes, and control the time-position and amount of the vibrato.

Since Prima is a virtual vocalist, you have control over all of the following parameters:

• Changing syllables/phonemes
• Timing of each note (precise position/length).
• Vibrato (you can change its type/position/amount/frequency).
• Volume
• Attack
• Crescendo or diminuendo
• Pitch bend (amount, and positionable in time)
• Glide (portamento)
• Resonance (Frequency/bandwidth/amplitude)
• Harmonics.
• Noise.
• Brightness
• Clearness
• Gender factor

The Prima demos sound much more realistic and musical than earlier virtual vocalists. It sounds like the second generation virtual vocalists are getting to where they’ll be useful for demoing realistic vocal tracks, but also for generating bizarre vocal effects.

Supported Interfaces & Standards:

VST 2.0, ReWire

Recommended Retail Price:

$199.95 US Dollars (169 Euros / 114.95 pounds sterling)

System Requirements:

Windows XP/Vista, Pentium 4 2 GHz/ Athlon XP 2000, 512 MB RAM (1GB of RAM recommended) (2 GB or more recommended when using VSTi realtime)· Approx 4 GB Free Hard Disk Space / DVD Drive.