CANTOR Upgraded to Version 1.5

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CANTOR 1.5 is a major upgrade incorporating a completely revised vocal synthesis engine, making it easier to produce intelligible vocal lines. This was achieved with an improved filter model and a new kind of rule-based phoneme sequencer which adapts the phoneme transitions according to the context inside a word.

The purpose of CANTOR is not to replace "human" singers, but more for the creation of new virtual character voices whose base sound can be influenced by the user in a flexible manne, all in realtime. VirSyn's web site contains some examples to give you an idea of what CANTOR is capable of.

With CANTOR, you enter your lyrics in plain english and then your computer will "sing" your lyrics instantly just by playing the melody on your MIDI Keyboard. Add expression with realtime parameters controlling vibrato rate and depth or changing the character of the singing voice from female to male.

Many available parameters have no relation to human vocals, such as "Metallize" which turns your virtual singer more into a singing Gong. The voice editor allows you to edit the character of your virtual singer by defining the base spectrum for vowels and consonants. For those of you that want to create your own alien language, the Phoneme editor gives you full access to the atoms of the vocal synthesis engine. With this editor you can define the formant structure and the noise characteristic of each phoneme used by the vocal engine. Features:

• 8 part vocal synthesis engine
• plays lyrics in realtime
• english phoneme dictionary (120000 words)
• no samples used
• score editor
• voice editor
• phoneme editor
• Realtime editing
• Brightness
• Humanize
• Metallize
• Gender factor
• Vibrato
• Breath noise
• Interfaces
• stand alone mode
• VST 2 / AudioUnit
• ReWire / RTAS
• Microtuning
• Scala compatible microtuning

System requirements:

• Mac G4 > 400 Mhz
• PC Pentium III > 600 Mhz
• Athlon XP/MP
• 256 MB RAM
• Mac OX 10.2 / WinXP

Demo versions for both Mac and PC are available for download.

For more information, visit their web site at www.virsyn.com.