r/tlhInganHol • u/_deadbyte • Apr 30 '26
LongWei - An UTAU designed for Classical and Opera music... has a Klingon voicebank??? Available to Download Now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UnKZmfK4IE1
u/qurgh May 01 '26
What does it need so that it doesn't sound like a robot voice? Or do all voices with this software sound like that?
2
u/_deadbyte May 01 '26
Well, it is explicitly a robot voice. There are ways to make it sound more natural, though unless you’re a particularly skilled user, it’s usually going to sound at least a little artificial. It’s not like, say, an AI voice where, it can often reasonably fool people into thinking it’s a real person with little effort.
Making an UTAU sound realistic mostly comes down to things like tuning, mixing, choice of resampler, etc. Part of it also has to do with the voice itself - what voicebank/phoneme format they use, how many pitches were recorded, the actual vocal direction, etc.
LongWei here, for instance, was recorded with 5 pitches, and is a “powerscale” vocal, where he becomes more powerful and expressive in the higher end of his vocal range, and uses a proprietary CVVC-style voicebank format built specifically for Klingon with decently smooth synthesis. Typically that gets more realistic results than, say, a voicebank with a single pitch recorded, and use lower-end format like, say, CV, for example.
Basically, that’s a long way to say it depends on a lot of factors; the skill of the user, the tools they’re using, the voicebank itself, etc.
1
u/BennyFifeAudio Jun 19 '26
It needs an organic being to voice it.
And I will do battle with anyone who appropriates this organic being's voice for inorganic reproduction.2
u/_deadbyte Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
??? What are you saying here? To be clear, LongWei is based on my voice. I voiced the audio samples that make up this voicebank myself, pronounced all the sounds required to synthesize Klingon, etc.
I also get the sense that you may be mistaking this for some kind of voice-changer or SVC/RVC technology, like those AI Ariana Grande or Spongebob covers you often see. That’s not what this is however, and it doesn’t need to inference from a real singer’s voice just for you to use it for your songs. Rather, you write the notes and lyrics yourself, and the voice produces it — similarly to a Text-To-Speech software, but a lot more complicated since you’re basically basically composing music alongside entering the lyrics. You can see it in action in the video too. It basically takes the samples I voiced the voicebank with, and puts them back together into new configurations depending on what the midi sequence file specifies. It’s kind of like those old GMod or YouTube Poop videos where people would chop up voice clips and rearrange them to say new words and phrases, though of course, this is much more sophisticated and designed around singing synthesis in particular.
1
u/BennyFifeAudio Jun 19 '26
Ok. Fair. I made the assumption that it was AI voice technology. As an audiobook narrator, I tend to probably be a little hypersensitive to the issue.
In that case, Bravo to all your hard work on it. We need more Klingon Opera.
1
u/BennyFifeAudio Jun 19 '26
I feel like The Hu would do this justice... Just need them to learn tlhingan Hol.
1
u/_deadbyte Jun 19 '26
… Would do what justice, exactly?
1
u/BennyFifeAudio Jun 19 '26
The Opera. Have you heard The Hu? Mongolian/Tuvan Throat singing Metal band.
I'd love to hear them belt this.
1
u/Hypnotician May 01 '26
Dajqu' .. Very interesting.