Voxen, the synthesizer different
Voxen is a voice synthesizer. It lets you synthesize singing voices.
Any voice, not just the few voices that someone else designed into it.
Plus voices that no vocalist can sing.
No pitch shifting. No time warping.
Just good ol’ pure synthesis.
Voxen is based on the voice synthesis technology used by speech scientists and psychoacousticians around the globe. Even though it can be great fun to play with, it is not a toy. Voxen is intended for musicians, DJs and producers who are looking for new and different sources of sounds.
It’s time to set your aural imagination free…
FEATURES
- Eight note polyphony
- Keyboard range of more than ten octaves
- Three X-Y touchpads
- Twenty-eight vertical linear knobs
- Choice of dark or light background colour
- Eight choices of foreground colour
- Save and load user-defined patches
TECHNICAL DETAILS
For those who are interested in the more technical details, Voxen is a polyphonic formant synthesizer. There are three banks of knobs which control, respectively, the voice, the voice envelope and the formants. The six voice knobs control provide a modified Klatt 1989 voicing source. The ten voice envelope knobs control master amplitude and ADSR envelope for the voicing source and for a separate aspiration source. The remaining twelve knobs control the centre frequencies and bandwidths of the first four formants and the centre values and differences (spread) for a nasal formant/antiformant pair.
Each of the three X-Y touchpads controls a pair of parameters, f1 & f2, b1 & b2 and vibrato rate & vibrato depth.
Spectral tilt (or voice brightness) is controlled by the height you are touching the keys.
The overall aim of the user interface is to make it simple to control the many parameters in a live setting. The colours are based on the Solarized theme by Ethan Schoonover.
And if none of that made sense to you, dont worry. You do not need to understand any of it to make cool sounds with Voxen.
SUPPORT
If you have any questions or problems, our community forum is the best place to find support: http://community.modphon.com
This is version 1.0, so please do not expect perfection. It would be nice to believe that all bugs have been found and eliminated, but years of experience says that there are still a few left to be found. If you do find a problem, please tell us so we can fix it!
There is additional functionality already in the pipeline for version 1.1 and beyond. Top of the list are MIDI and Audiobus support. We have great plans for Voxen. Visit our community forum to help shape the future of Voxen.
PS
Voxen is *not* a text-to-speech system. You cannot provide it with lyrics and expect it to sing them. Voxen is a synthesizer that acoustically simulates a glottis and vocal tract, allowing you to manually control the sound. It synthesizes sounds, not words.
Because a human voice is more complex than nearly any other musical instrument, a synthesizer of human voices is also very complex. To control one can require the real-time manipulation and coordination of dozens of separate parameters.
If you are looking for something that creates a musical performance from a piece of sheet music and some lyrics on a scrap of paper, hire a good vocalist. On the other hand, if you are looking some new and different sounds, use Voxen.