Said to be capable of "expressive vocal synthesis beyond anything heard before," Wolfgang Palm's Phonem is a new plugin for PC and Mac.
The software is designed to replicate all kinds of voices (from whispers to screams) and comes with a text to speech tool so that you can make it 'say' whatever you want. It's built around a filter that offers 12 individual resonators; as well as vocal sounds, these can be used for filter sweeps and effects, while the 'excitation source' simulates a human's glottis. You can also use wavetables and time-corrected samples to drive the filter.
Flexibility is the key here: each phoneme can be edited in detail, while the pitch and control tracks can make the voice sing to your specification. There's a modulation matrix, which enables you to modify the sound using LFOs, envelopes or two X/Y control pads, and plenty of presets are included to get you started.
A full spec list is below, and you can watch Wolfgang Palm talking you through Phonem in the video above.
Phonem will be available on 18 November in 32/64-bit VST/AU formats priced at €119. Find out more on the Wolfgang Palm website.
Wolfgang Palm Phonem specs
- Create your own singing style
- Create your own expressions
- Large Phoneme inventory - 46 english/american plus 5 german plus 4 french phonemes
- Versatile excitation generator/oscillator
- Working with typical voice source or wavetable and time-corrected-samples (TCS)
- Extreme time stretching, freezing and reversing
- Pitch track - let your robots sing
- Control track - let it cry and shout
- Song mode - making it easy to compose your synthesized text
- Wave page - create your own wavetables and modify time-corrected-samples
- All internal parameters available to the user - give your voices a special dialect or individual character
- Versatile matrix system - allowing 19 sources to control 40 parameters
- Two X/Y control pads freely routable to 40 parameters
- 6 Envelopes, for control of filter sweeps, waveform, noise and many modulations
- 4 LFOs plus Vibrato, Flutter and Growl generators
- Fully programmable resonator filter - allowing production of new sound effects
- Delay/Reverb effect
- Overdrive/Distortion effect
- Directly accessible context help for each module
- Freely configurable schematic keypad, with extremely expressive modulation options
- Ribbon controller to bend the pitch to variable intervals
- 5 Keyboard Modes including mono, legato and voice-per-channel
- Import WTS and TCS files from WaveGenerator or WaveMapper 2