SERAPHIM Live! - Singing Synthesis for the Performer, the Composer, and the 3D Game Developer

The human singing voice is highly expressive instrument capable of producing a variety of complex timbres. Singing synthesis today is popular amongst composers and studio musicians accessing the technology by means of offline sequencing platforms. Only a couple of singing synthesizers are known to be equipped with both the real-time capability and the user interface to successfully target live performances. These are LIMSI’s Cantor Digitalis and Yamaha’s VOCALOID Keyboard. However, both systems have their own shortcomings. The former is limited to vowels and does not synthesize complete words or syllables. The latter is only real-time to the syllable level and thus requires specifications of the entire syllable before it commences in the performance. A demand remains for a singing synthesis system that truly solves the problem of real-time synthesis a system capable of synthesizing both vowels and consonants to form entire words while being capable of synthesizing in real-time to the sub-frame level. Such a system has to be versatile enough to exhaustively present all acoustic options possible to the user for maximal control while being intelligent enough to fill in acoustic details that are too fine for human reflexes to control. SERAPHIM is a real-time singing synthesizer developed in answer to this demand. This paper presents the implementation of SERAPHIM for performing musicians and studio musicians, together with how 3D game developers may use Seraphim to deploy singing in their games.