Making The Theremin ‘Sing’

This video demonstrates T-Voks: Singing and Speaking with the Theremin.

The video is sparse on details, but it uses sampled speech to modulate the spectra of the theremin. An earlier approach to the ‘singing theremin’ uses a vocal formant filter with the theremin.

Video Summary:

For its 100th birthday, the Theremin has been gifted with speech. Performative singing synthesis met this early electronic instrument at NIME 2019.

Reference: T-Voks: Singing and Speaking with the Theremin Xiao Xiao, Grégoire Locqueville, Christophe d’Alessandro, Boris Doval Proceedings of The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, NIME 2019, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 3-6 June 2019.

T-Voks (singing Theremin) : Xiao Xiao Piano: Boris Doval Flute : Benoît Fabre C-Voks (singing tablet) : Boris Doval, Christophe d’Alessandro, Grégoire Locqueville

via hackaday

10 thoughts on “Making The Theremin ‘Sing’

  1. This is impressive technically – but I like the simple ‘aaah’ theremin performance, because it captures the quality of vocal performance, but doesn’t try to be an exact imitation. .

    Synthesis sound cooler to me when it’s a separate, distinct thing from acoustic or natural sounds. When people start doing highly imitative synthesis, it can be interesting but also makes me wonder why they don’t just hire a vocalist/instrumentalist.

  2. I don’t get the point. Why not just use the singer on stage instead of “vocoding” the singers samples with a Theremin?

    1. We could also use “real” instruments on stage instead of faking choirs, strings and percussion with synthesizers and samplers. But we choose to explore electronic sound generation instead.

      This is no Woodwindtopia or Choraltopia, after all.

  3. If you want to sing, sing.

    A technical success and true genius, but it manages to sound creepy. Unless you can do this live, it cramps one’s style.

    A Mel9 is simple, cheap and requires no extra effort. But it won’t talk. That’s my job.

  4. Mr. Rodgers totally from the get go. It is technically impressive but I couldn’t listen to that from beginnning to end or come back for a second helping. It needs to stay in a library quiet room or sterile academic equivalent.

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