SYNTAL, a Speech-Derived Music Synthesizer by Wayne Slawson

Notes on Version 06
Freeware offered through Yank Gulch Music
Copyright © 2006. All rights reserved.

Introduction to SYNTAL

SYNTAL is a Csound “orchestra” and a group of C-language subroutines and macros that support the composition and synthesis of speech-derived music.

The Csound orchestra contains an adaptation for music synthesis of the speech synthesizer developed by the late Dennis Klatt of MIT's Research Laboratory for Electronics, and described in Klatt, D. H., and L.C. Klatt (1990) “Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Voice Quality Variations Among Female and Male Talkers” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 87/2 (February): 820–57. The voice source and other components of the orchestra are based on research by Gunnar Fant and Johan Liljencrans of the Department of Speech Communication and Music Acoustics of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.

The C-language functions and macros provide ways to generate control signals for the Csound orchestra from specifications that are close analogs to musical events. For example, an isolated musical event that is 2.45 beats in duration, has a consonant-like onset, a vowel color similar to that in the word “tea”, a moderately high loudness at the onset, followed by a soft-to-loud overall contour, a pitch of viola-C, noise excitation that starts at silence and rises to a soft level, and a decay of 0.60 beats, could be specified as follows:

tv_ 2.45,II,II,MF,PP,FF,CN3,Nte, P, 0.60

This statement—in actuality a C-language macro call—results in a series of entries in a file that functions as a Csound numeric “score”. A composer using SYNTAL writes a C-language program that consists almost entirely of macro calls of this sort. The composer need not know how to “program in C”, but she may interpolate C-language code if she wishes.

The programs in the SYNTAL system are available without charge from Yank Gulch Music under the provisions of the Gnu General Public License. A rough manual, which includes a tutorial section and a number of examples, is also available. SYNTAL is typically run using Unix scripts at the command-line level. At least some knowledge of Unix commands is required. At the moment, the SYNTAL system is not available in the form of a disk image, but it has been implemented by the author on a number of Apple computers running Mac OS 10.4 and higher. The Apple Development System must be activated and Csound installed before installing SYNTAL.

Those interested in implementing SYNTAL are invited to inquire via e-mail.