This is my foray into early Baroque opera using Solaria, Natalie and Kevin:
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Did you use something like Vocaloidâs robotic mode? Doesnât sound like flesh and blood singing - sorry! The movement between notes is very mechanical.
Good question. I think because, on this specific piece, there are so many repeated notes, it is more difficult to create the contour of a natural sounding human voice. Also, I reduced the vibrato and irregular shape of each note in order to mimic the church singing choir sound of the late Renaissance.
Wow, I donât think anyone can claim to know what the music of this period truly sounded like or the techniques used to perform it. We donât even have a solid basis for knowing what temperament was in vogue, though many have made, shall we say, âeducatedâ, guesses as to what that might be starting with Pythagoras.
It would be nice if Dreamtonics added true microtonality to SV2, one that could be controlled externally by OddSoundâs MTS-ESP so the voice(s) could more readily blend with other instrument tracks in your DAW that also respond to MTS-ESP.
After all, is not the human voice the most flexible of instruments???
All excellent points. You are right that we cannot know what the sound was truly back then like but we guess from scholarly analyses what was possible. We know something of how pitch worked based on surviving instruments like pipe organs and flutes/recorders. We often know the spaces where performances were done and how singers were positioned to maximize dramatic effect. In Monteverdiâs time, we get some notation of forte and piano. Musicologists like Tinctoris and Praetorius who wrote about compositional styles, harmonic structure, rhythm schemes and other theory matters, but unfortunately a granular deconstruction of each piece is pure speculation.
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Well, but I think you could use more vibrato. A reluctant use of it compared to the 19th century is more than likely. But it was discussed in the books of the time, and it surely was a means of expression around 1600 for singers as well as for instrumentalists. (Even if an author complains about the use of vibrato and wants to prohibit it, it shows that it was in use.)
This is operatic music, not church music, sung by very professional singers.They knew what they were doing, whether to use a modulation of pitch or only of intensity (more common), whether to use vibrato as embellishment or as means of dramatic expression. There was not so much need as in the 19th century for vibrato as constant feature and means of producing a âfatâ sound because they had not to sing against the bombastic apparatus of f.e. a Wagner orchestra.
Taking these things into account, I guess, could be an interesting task for a synthesizer V âmockupâ of ancient music.
In the churches there were often only those singers that were accidentally at hand (for J.S. Bach f.e. the pupils of the Leipzig Thomas school), but every aspiring Kapellmeister will have told them something about vibrato, and even if not: I guess any untrained voice produces some kind of modulation. Ainât it difficult to sing as âstraightâ as a computer voice?
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