Once I taught highschool choir, I’d typically create rehearsal tracks for my college students utilizing music notation software program. These tracks wouldn’t have phrases, however can be an instrumental sound–often a piano, as I couldn’t stand the choral “oo” sound that’s designated to many notation applications.
One yr, when presenting at ACDA in Salt Lake Metropolis, one other choir director got here up and informed me about how he used PDF to Music Professional to create rehearsal tracks for his college students with phrases. He would even create MusicXML and PDF information to import to this system! PDF to Music Professional is great in that it takes any pc generated notation PDF and converts it to MusicXML, with considerably fewer errors than different scanning applications.
This was at a time when telephone scanning was nonetheless new (previous to this, a flatbed scanner was wanted to carry out Music Optical Character Recognition). I believe Neuratron’s NotateMe (with scanning means) was considerably new on the time. And round this time interval, Finale discontinued its direct means to scan music.
PDF to Music Professional’s voice function was a bit eerie–however undoubtedly a begin in the precise route. I didn’t spend a lot time making rehearsal tracks with PDF to Music Professional (I typically use it to avoid wasting time importing notation from a pc generated PDF), however I understood the use.
It has been a few years since I taught highschool (11!) and one other 5 years since I final taught center faculty; and we suspended elementary choir for 3 years because of COVID. Choir returned in our elementary colleges final yr (they saved moving into highschool and center faculty), which has been satisfying for me, as it’s an additional responsibility that may be very straightforward with my previous as a secondary choral educator.
This yr, now we have a brief descant in an association of “Over My Head,” and college students shall be auditioning for it. I’ve wished to discover a strategy to document it for my college students, however I’m not a soprano, and I’ve no intentions of singing the half in my falsetto.
Lately, on the Workers Pad Fb Group, a member posted about utilizing Synthesizer V Studio Fundamental to create voice elements, free of charge, with this system and free voices. So I gave this system a trial. You might want to obtain the applying after which the voice(s) you need; paid (I’d guess extra refined) voices can be found, too. You enter notes in a Piano Roll (I’d think about you may import the elements as a MusicXML or MIDI file), after which add the textual content you need sung on every be aware. The fundamental voice (I used Eleanor Forte Lite) does an honest job with English.
I then took the rendered WAV file and embedded it over the mp3 accompaniment monitor of “Over My Head” utilizing Audacity. I needed to do some work with the WAV file to “stretch” (Audacity permits this) the brand new voice file to match the accompaniment…nevertheless it labored.
Is it an ideal voice demo? No. However is it higher than the synthesized voice of PDF to Music Professional? Sure. And might my college students use it to rehearse for an audition? Completely.
What I’m enthusiastic about is the place this leads sooner or later. Think about being able for a program like Dorico, Notion, MuseScore, or StaffPad to have a vocal half the place you’d enter the lyrics, and it might do the vocal rendering for you (or you may “tweak” the pronunciation as wanted). As this know-how is on the market, all it must do is to be acquired or licensed, and packaged into one other program.
At that time, vocal musicians in every single place (not simply administrators) could have the power to very simply scan music (there are already a number of good purposes for that), add phrases (in the event that they don’t scan accurately), and export rehearsal tracks.
It has been some time since I’ve seen know-how take a soar ahead for musicians–most of our know-how has simply been bettering fairly than leaping forward. This might be a major soar!
