Hello everyone, here is a Catholic religious song, performed with the voices of synth V2, all in French. Is it understandable? Have a good day everyone.
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Hello, while I am not at all into religious songs, my first language is French.
I don’t know how difficult it is to get the proper french phonemes out of Synthesizer V, and while the french in your song is ok and understandable, it does have a slight accent that doesn’t match any French accent I’ve heard (either from France, or from Quebec where I come from). Sounds more as if the singer is not french-native. The accent is nowhere as strong as an english speaker speaking french, it’s more subtle, but to a french speaker, it is still noticeable.
But perhaps that is the best that can be done with the available phonemes? I havn’t listened to other french synthesizer v songs, so I don’t have any comparative.
P.S. I listened only to the first minute of your song so far, my headphone batteries ran out and need to be recharged.
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Hi!,
Well, that’s a good try, but… it doesn’t sound like French, even if it were performed by an English speaker, for example 
.
For my part, I’ve tried everything… but nothing works, it doesn’t sound “right”.
We have to patiently wait for real French voices… I still don’t understand why they aren’t available, by the way.
I am waiting for them to invest in V2.
Fingers crossed!!!
I’ll have to disagree with you about “it doesn’t sound like French”.
French is my first language, and I think it does sound like french, albeit with a foreign accent. I hear far worse from real people speaking french when its not their first language. I sometimes had to speak to employees in stores in english because their french was so bad it was difficult to understand.
As for Synthesizer V, I tried in the past days to see if I could manage to get the accent out in a french song. The mouth opening parameter in V2 helps a lot, but even there, it is still very difficult to have it sound right. With A LOT of time and tweaks, it might be possible, but its quite difficult.
Here is my earliest attempt at 16th century French using the Spanish and English phonemes.
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Oh my… with the type of singing, layered polyphonic voices not singing the same words at the same time, and in ancient french at that, I can’t even tell it’s french, let alone make out what the words say! But it also hides any accent there might be.
I’ve been able to grasp only a few words at the beginning by following with the written words on the music sheet before it disappeared. I think there is still an accent though, but then, who can tell how french really sounded like in the 16th century?
I think the pronunciation of any ancient language is based on rhyme schemes in song and poetry as well as extrapolations from currently surviving, isolated pockets of a language group like certain rural dialects in rural France or Quebec.
This is just my experience, but I’ve used certain vocal modes to emulate French nasal vowels, namely Feng Yi’s Opera, Asterian’s Theatrical, and Oscar’s Nasal. I’m also convinced that Noa’s Nasal vocal mode also can be used for this purpose, though I don’t own him.
True enough, but even the language of those isolated groups would have evolved over 500 years and wouldn’t sound the same as back then.
From these bits of information, we can extrapolate and do an eduated guess at what the language might have sounded like at that time. The truth is, it remains an approximation, and, short of inventing a time machine, we just don’t know exactly how it sounded.
True enough. It is all an approximation. I mostly used Tim McGee’s book “Singing Early Music” as my main reference.