Voice Command

[pasithea]

Oh dear. Look at that music tag.

Don't get excited. It's nothing.... yet...

So, I've been doing art by voice command the past few days and it's been being pretty successful and then I thought of something... If there's software to do voice recognition of commands, there should be some for creating scores from singing or something.

I poked around a bit and found such things did exist and found out a lot about AU's versus VSTs. There are lots of freeware ones for Windows, of course, and a few VST ones for Mac, but GarageBand doesn't do VST plugins, just AUs.

Finally I found one. WIDI Voice to MIDI Audio Unit, with a free demo. Woot!

It doesn't seem to like my IntelMac. *cry* but it works okay on my G4. Their help files are pretty badly translated but I finally figured it out and got it working.

Anyhow... Here's a simple test (annoying whistling and the raw MIDI it created played overlayed)

http://circle.twu.net/audio/dirty.mp3

Not bad. I mean okay, it's gawdawful and cacaphonious BUT... You can hear in it that it basically works. If I practiced a little bit and did some sound processing on the raw audio file going into the program, I could probably come out with a pretty close approximation.

For experiment 2, I tried doing something a little faster and singing. Then I went through and cleaned up the MIDI score it created. In this one, I omitted the voice because my singing is more grating than my whistling. A slightly cleaned up version of the second trial sounds like this:

http://circle.twu.net/audio/gothic.mp3

Okay. Still pretty awful. There are two notes that are really wrong in there, and the timing on a lot of the notes is really um... organic for a lack of a nicer word.

But towards the end, when I started remembering stuff about harmonics that I learned in keyboard class last fall, I started adding chords, using the scoring it created as a starting point and working from there and... It starts to almost sound kinda cool.

I need to spend more than a half hour playing with it, but I think this is already far more productive than me recording a bit I whistled, then trying to bang it out on the keyboard and writing each note on paper. With a little practice, I think I could turn this into a tool I could actually use.

And at the very least, it already existed so I didn't have to write it myself. How lucky is that? :)

Comments

[doctorpinkerton.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, I wonder... how could this possibly be used for EVIL?

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

The noises I made were, if not evil, at the very least horrible.

Perhaps one could use it to turn the music of pop-stars into synthetic organs, similar to that scene in Barbarella.