Arboretum Previews Vocal Harmony Processor

(Click for a close-up)

Attendees of the 105th AES Convention today got the first look at a groundbreaking new voice processing technology which imprints the vocal "personality" or "character" of various singers onto any vocalist.

Arboretum Harmony is a state-of-the-art real time formant-based vocal processor. Designed to provide a complete voice processing solution, it offers eight-part harmony generation, pitch correction and a full complement of built-in DSP effects.

Most significantly, Arboretum Harmony is the first product to employ Arboretum's new proprietary Vocal Personality technology, which imparts vocal characteristics from one voice to another. The Vocal Personality process begins with the analysis of a source voice; its formants are mapped and saved as a Personality Filter.

Arboretum has factory-analyzed a great number of singers and will be shipping a wide assortment of preset Personality Filters with Arboretum Harmony. When using Arboretum Harmony the formants of any input voice may be removed and replaced by the format set from a Personality Filter.

The sonic result of the Personality Filter is both useful and distinct. It's not like one singer imitating another, it's like giving a singer someone else's throat.

In addition to the unique Vocal Personality features, Arboretum Harmony provides sophisticated format-based harmonization and pitch correction which maintains the naturalness of phrasing and vibrato. Arboretum Harmony will simultaneously generate up to eight separate harmony voices in real time. It reduces the artifacts which can result from large pitch shifts by preserving the formant, meaning more natural sounding pitch correction.

Users may control the sonic characteristics of each voice independently, adjusting the formants, equalization, pitch tracking accuracy and pitch offset. Arboretum Harmony allows extensive control of the harmony mix with two effect inserts, two effects sends, volume and pan for each voice. In-line real-time effects include delay, echo, reverb, chorus, flanger, phaser, autopan, compressor/limiter, EQ, and Harmonic Exciter.

Arboretum Harmony has an intuitive graphic user interface, all scales may be completely user-defined, it includes an extensive scale and harmony library, and is designed for both professional and project studio recording.

A stand-alone signal processing application for the MacOS, Arboretum Harmony requires a 200 MHz 604 processor or faster for real-time operation; users may opt for off-line processing on slower systems. Arboretum Harmony offers direct driver support for the Digidesign Audiomedia II and III and the Korg 1212 I/O, and will work with other audio hardware, including Digidesign Pro Tools systems, using manufacturer supplied Sound Manager Drivers. Arboretum Harmony is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 1999, pricing has yet to be determined.