Time for a little Christmas cleaning. I was looking for something else among the tens of thousands of files on my computer and came across this micro-project I barely remembered from 2020. Someone had posted the following "formula for a Christmas carol" meme:
Well, that was an obvious enough challenge to which I did respond, though only on Facebook, so it's been tucked in the back of my virtual desk drawer. If my Facebook book post from December 2020 can be believed, I gave myself a 15-minute time limit to write something, and then spent another 15-minutes creating this video version:
So when I stumbled upon it today, I couldn't help but think it would be nice to have it sung by voices. I had created this underwater-sounding rendition using some very primitive digital voices, but I knew this technology is moving ahead a bit - although it's still not that realistic. BUT, for this purpose, something a little silly would be on point, so I tried the "try it free" feature on the still-developing page of Cantai, a curious project which is mainly the brainchild of one person.
From what I can tell, Cantai (which I enjoy imagining as meaning "Can't I?") is rather firmly stuck in the uncanny valley for now, but perhaps it will get to a more useful stage. Cantai's software uses sampled voices of real singers who are paid for their work both upfront and through some sort of revenue-sharing. I think part of the current issue is that its developer prefers a particular kind of highly expressive style which just sounds exaggerated and a little creepy. Check out this really unsettling adaptation of Chopin's Berceuse, an absolutely perfect piano piece which sounds downright frightening as a robo-vocal duet.
And that's all we have for today, although you should note that:
Whether or not this kind of thing is good for real singers and musicians is...a topic for another day, though the technology will surely get better and better. Whether Cantai is the product that leads the way to something genuinely useful is also only something time will tell. But my little micro-carol is silly and lighthearted anyway, so I found it suited my purpose. I did have to do some tweaking, so I recorded each voice separately. Most alarming is how out-of-tune some of the output was. I left in the amusingly scooped bass entrance on "cow," but I had to pitch-correct the descant part quite a bit.
And here it is, a ten-second carol which makes a nice companion to the seven-second symphonic selections I wrote back a couple of months back. You can't accuse these compositions of overstaying their welcome!
And that's all we have for today, although you should note that:
- You may now view the entire, ongoing "Emptying the Desk Drawer" series via this permalink.
- This video has also been added to my "MM Christmas" playlist. And you may find lots of MMmusing Christmas content at the end of this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment