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Demo projects

First steps

The demo projects

As you can imagine - CANTOR is not a “preset” kind of synth. To help you entering the world of vocal synthesis we prepared a few demo projects as a starting point for your own experiments. We strongly recommend that you have a look at these demos. You can load any of these with the “Load project” command of the file menu ( the small disk icon in the top bar of CANTOR ).

Here´s a short description of the demo projects you will find:

- HosannaChoir

This is an excerpt from the well known Musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Three “airy” female voices and two male voices without much tweaking result in a very clean sounding ethereal choir. This project was used for the audio demo on our website !

- StopDave

- I can feel it

- HALShutdown

Inspired by Stanley Kubrick´s “2001: A Space Odyssey” this projects demonstrate a robotic voice of HAL speaking, singing and “dying”... You can learn here the difference between speaking and singing: have a look at the pitch envelopes ( click on the “P” button in the toolbar ) and you will quickly see that the strong pitch modulation on spoken words makes them “pitchless”.

- Bicycle

Another song from our audio demos. Daisy Bell was written in 1892 by Harry Dacre. Just a single female voice used for a simple song.

- Rosenfole

A medieval song from Norway, inspired by the interpretation of Agnes Buen Garnas / Jan Garbarek. A good demonstration that CANTOR is not limited to english or german. You can see in the score that we directly entered the phonemes based on a german voice to produce the desired words. This project also exploits the new possibilites of the free pitch, vibrato and volume envelopes to get a much more natural sound characteristic.

- HipHopDrums

Simple drum pattern with “Boom, Tschak” style voices...
...CANTOR is not only about singing.

- Roboter

Remember that CANTOR allows a lot of voices which you simply can´t get with any other method - and you can even understand it. But only if you know german - cause it´s made from a few german words.

- Model

A much more normal german voice singing a small excerpt of a song from the famous german group “Kraftwerk”

- Frankenstein

Fragment from a german hit of the mid 70s “Frankenstein” from Frank Zander, exploiting a very strong and rough german voice.

- TheresAVoice

This another snippet from one of our audio demos: Will i dream. A really nice duet using one female and one male voice singing about themselves...

- Gregorian

Another demo showing you the way using arbitrary languages with CANTOR. There´s no dictionary support for latin phrases in CANTOR yet, but latin is very easy to translate into german phonemes because there´s not much difference between written and spoken latin.

- Haleluja

Perhaps the most famous choir piece of all times. Couldn´t resist...

First steps

Ready for your first own steps ? Then the following tutorial will show you how to enter a few notes together with the lyrics. It will also demonstrate you the tools needed to tweak the pronunciation and to add various expressions to the vocal line. For a full description of all functionalities please don´t miss to have a look into the manual !

This is the start of a series of “mini” tutorials we plan to publish in regular time intervals.   

- Compose your melody and enter the lyrics

You can enter your melody the same way you´re used to with other sequencer programs like Cubase/Logic. For vocal lines you have to add the lyrics and CANTOR will translate them into a special phoneme description using it´s german/english pronunciation dictionary.

1. select the pencil tool from the toolbar

2. click into the matrix editor and drag the note to the required length

now you see a grey bar representing the note with a default text "a" on
top of the note and the phonetic transcription "AH1".

3. Click into the text and enter the word “My” now.

The words you enter are automatically translated in a phoneme description. The word “My” is translated to “M AY1”. The number after AY expresses the relative stress of the vowel which influences the relative duration in the phoneme sequence.

- Adjust the pronunciation to your taste

The duration of the phonemes strongly influences the pronunciation and the intelligiblity of a word. CANTOR tries to make a good guess dependent on the length of the note. But sometimes you need to tweak the phoneme sequence for better results. The word “Song” is a good example: if you play the sequence above you probably wish that the last phoneme “NG” should be longer. You can easily do this with the phoneme micro sequencer. Select the arrow tool on the toolbar and click on the note. It´s now drawn in dark grey to indicate the selection. In the window below the matrix editor you will see now the sequence of the phonemes as shown below:

Now click into the boundary between the phonemes “AO1” and “NG” and drag the mouse to the left. The “NG” phoneme is now longer and has a more natural pronunciation !
In the phoneme sequencer you can also change the level of the consonants: if the “S” seems to loud for your taste just press the control key (Mac: alt key) and click the red level line and drag it up or down.

- Add expression and vibrato

The human voice “lives” from it´s expressivity. All important parameters to achieve livelike performance are in your reach with CANTOR 2. Free envelopes for essential parameters like volume, tension, vibrato or pitch allows you to mimic any style down to spoken words.

Select the volume parameter in the editor window below the matrix editor and take the pen tool from the toolbar. Now you can draw individual volume envelopes for each note:

The matrix editor can be switched in three different views which can be selected by the toolbar buttons labeled “N”, “P” and “V” :
N - shows the notes together with the lyrics and the phonemes
P - pitch view for displaying and editing the continous pitch envelopes.
V - vibrato view for displaying and editing the vibrato amount.

Now switch to the pitch view and add some pitch slurs to the notes using the pen tool:

Vibrato is one of the most common modulations for voice like phrases. Switch to the vibrato view and can simply draw the vibrato amount into the score using the pen tool as before:

All these modulations can be applied independently to each note. But often it´s very useful to apply modulations made for one note to a group of other notes. If you want to do this select the note you have done the modulations already. Then select “copy automation” from the context menu of the matrix editor - which opens on a right mouse click - and then select all notes you want the same modulations to be applied. With “paste to selected” the modulations are then applied to all selected notes !

Now we´re coming to the end of this first tutorial. It was only a “scratching on the surface” but hopefully gave you a good start for your own experiments. For a more detailed description please have also a look into the manual.

And stay tuned for more tutorials here !