The Human Voice.

It's still the most expressive and emotionally communicative musical instrument available to mankind.

UNLESS, of course, you cannot sing. Or you don't have access to a quality singer when you need one, to bring reality to your ideas or your lyrics.

Either you can sing or you can't. Either you have a great singer who realizes your ideas or you don't. For most creative music producers, this means that in one sense the human voice has also always been a sonic boundary - a musical frontier, through thousands of years of evolution:

UNTIL NOW!!

A true revolution.

When it comes to creating quality vocal tracks, Yamaha's VOCALOID singing synthesis technology literally changes everything. The future will now be very different. The last bastion of human musical expression - the singing voice - has been realistically harnessed in synthesis. Now it's time for YOU to express your music in YOUR own words. You can sing your heart out - through MIRIAM, LOLA, LEON, and other VOCALOID virtual vocalists from Zero-G, thanks to the incredible new technology developed by Yamaha.

MIRIAM is a virtual female vocalist modelled on the voice of Miriam Stockley, and when MIRIAM is installed into your PC you will literally be able to create singing of superb quality and realism. MIRIAM can sing ANY words you wish in English - literally anything - be they beautiful lyrics or comical trivialities, Monteverdi madrigals or manic chants. You can create vocal tracks in almost any style of singing, with any lyrics you want. You just enter the melodies, type in the lyrics, and synthesize. Then add expression to taste. MIRIAM puts singing under your total control, and the really mind-blowing thing is - MIRIAM can truly sound like a professional singing voice. With very little practice the results you get from MIRIAM will completely fool your friends - they will believe they are listening to a real singer performing. The question you will hear will always be "WHO is that?", and not "What is that?".

About "Miriam" Stockley:

British singer Miriam Stockley has an ideal voice upon which to model a Vocaloid virtual vocalist. Given the list of artists Miriam has worked with - a list that includes such names as Tina Turner, Elton John, George Michael, Freddie Mercury, Chaka Khan, David Bowie, Seal and Adiemus - you may be surprised that you haven't heard her name before. One of the most distinctive voices in the music industry, Miriam has probably sung on more hit records and with more success than most artists achieve in a lifetime. "Sonically, she's got ears like a bat" says vocal recording engineer Rod Houison. "She rolls out six part harmonies effortlessly. From a technical point of view she's in a class of her own." Being technically superb is only one side of Miriam. She also has a tremendously emotional delivery that can often send tingles down your spine, and is well known for her highly developed and unique vocal skills of multilayering vocal harmonies. In countless high profile concerts she has provided backing vocals (including for Elton John, Annie Lennox, David Bowie and Seal). Miriam's extensive studio work brought her to the attention of Karl Jenkins who had heard about her unique vocal style, and this led to the highly successful ADIEMUS project, whereby Jenkins' compositions featuring Miriam's vocals were recorded with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and released as "Songs Of Sanctuary" by ADIEMUS. The album was a huge international success and, together with the follow-ups "Cantata Mundi" and "Dances of Time" has so far sold well in excess of two million copies worldwide. "Only You," a hit Miriam performed with the group Praise, charted number two in the UK. After completing the third Adiemus album Miriam expanded her musical audience by releasing solo albums on Virgin, which have become recognised as vocal masterpieces.

Your own lead and backing singers, 24/7, and no session fees.

With VOCALOID, creating your own professional sounding backing vocals is quick and easy - even for complex harmonies and arrangements. And as you develop your VOCALOID editing skills, you will find that even lead vocal lines become a reality, thanks to the arsenal of expression tools provided, which permit manipulation of the finest nuances. Make no mistake, we are talking about MIRIAM being capable of taking the role of lead singer on a hit record.

IMAGINE what all this means for your music!!

Now you can COMMUNICATE emotion so directly. You can add HUMANITY to ANY production in ANY style without needing a human. You can CONTROL and PERFORM your OWN private virtual professional soul vocalist. You can even scat. You can create awesome backing vocals in harmonies for your tracks - in minutes. You can create stunning realism. OR... you can live in the exciting world between human and machine, where MIRIAM can even easily perform like a superhuman virtuoso android - as a true hybrid of human voice and synthesizer. The potential for innovation here is limited only by your own imagination.

What will YOU make MIRIAM sing?

Do you simply want her to perform your lyrical ideas as an aid to your songwriting process? Or will you use her freedom from human limitations to create stunningly innovative and experimental vocal effects? She can sing over a superb pitch range, she can sing much faster than a human could if you want her to, as fast as you like in fact, and she can jump any interval yet hit every note beautifully, IF that's want YOU want her to do. And she'll NEVER tire or complain.

In addition to singing any words or combination of syllables you can imagine, MIRIAM will spread any sustained vowel (or voiced consonant) across as many notes as you like, with perfect legato. You can select from several different natural vibrato types and drag and drop your chosen type to any note or notes, and control the time-position and amount of the vibrato for superb expressiveness and realism.

And that's just the beginning! - you have control over all of the following parameters, which you can bring to bear on any part of your creation:
# Changing syllables/phonemes (e.g. enter "liddle" instead of "little" etc).
# Timing of each note (precise position/length).
# Vibrato (you can change its type/position/amount/frequency).
# Volume.
# Attack.
# Crescendo or diminuendo.
# Pitch bend (amount, and positionable in time).
# Glide (portamento).
# Resonance (Frequency/bandwidth/amplitude).
# Harmonics.
# Noise.
# Brightness.
# Clearness.
# Gender factor.
# And of course, you can even change the singer (if you have purchased and installed more than one virtual singer) - perhaps get LEON or LOLA to sing your creation instead of MIRIAM. Instantly.

How Does It Work? Why does MIRIAM sound so real?

Few events have dramatically diverted the course of musical history. Synthesis, MIDI, Sampling - inventions of this magnitude are very rare events indeed. Singing Synthesis is such an event. Most acoustic instruments can be simulated well using various synthesis techniques, but (until Yamaha's VOCALOID techology came along) the singing voice resisted any serious simulation attempts. Hardly surprising, since singing has an extremely wide range of articulations, timbres, and transitions between sounds. And singing can communicate words as well as melody, which means you have a double layer of meaning, unlike other instruments. The human ear is so used to hearing the voice that even the finest tonal shifts or anomalies are immediately noticed. However, Yamaha's VOCALOID is in fact a totally new vocal-synthesis technology, achieving a much higher level of sophistication in this exciting area! The team at the Yamaha Advanced System Development Center in Japan has created software that emulates the singing voice with incredible accuracy.

Zero-G's development team have been working closely with Yamaha to create many 'vocal fonts' (virtual vocalists) for the VOCALOID system. The team starts each project by recording a professional vocalist singing literally all possible phonemes and transitions between syllables. Each transition is slightly different depending on the particular combination of phonemes, and these differences play a big part in how we understand words and whether a vocal track sounds natural or artificial. For example, the phoneme "p" sounds slightly different at the beginning of a word than it does at the end, and it affects the vowels next to it differently than, say, the phoneme "t".

The recordings of the professional singers are converted to the frequency domain using Fast Fourier Transform and divided into thousands of separate phonetic transitions which are processed in a unique way and then stored for use with the Vocaloid synthesis engine. Expressive tools such as vibrato, pitch bend, and attack are also derived from the real singing and stored separately.

To create a vocal track, you enter music and lyrics into the VOCALOID Editor (see screenshot). The melody can be entered by hand in the piano-roll style Editor or imported from a Standard MIDI File; the words are entered manually (either as words or as phonemes). Expressive elements can be imported from a MIDI File previously saved by the VOCALOID Editor, or entered via a graphic palette using drag-and-drop. Further detailed programming of expression parameters can be done graphically, for finely detailed results.