Just saw the news about Adele's upcoming surgery and canceled tour dates.

Given the risk to voice and the ongoing evolution of synthesized productions (where many performers' voice is already massively altered post production), it seems that recording a full range of audio into a sampler could be used to generate an Adele (or whomever) instrument, with the eventual capability of actually composing a song for the "Adele" instrument.
-- theircompetitor, Oct 28 2011

Daft Punk have been doing this for years http://www.youtube....watch?v=gAjR4_CbPpQ
Sampled voice turned into instrument. [theleopard, Oct 31 2011]

Laurie Anderson http://en.wikipedia...iki/Laurie_Anderson
Read the section on the Tape-bow violin. [DrBob, Oct 31 2011]

MC Hawking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Hawking
mining the early '00s nostalgia market soon, nae doot [calum, Oct 31 2011]

Isn't this sort of baked in a diffuse way? Sampling is widely used, and you can buy a wide variety of sampled voices for synths or computers.

I suspect that the reason lead singers are not replaced by their samples is that it's impossible to recreate the intonation and variety of the human voice.

Would you take short phoneme samples and join them up to form words? Or all possible words, sung in all possible intonations? If the former, you'll wind up with Stephen Hawking Sings the Blues. If the latter, the recordings you later produce will use only a tiny fraction of the samples you've made.

Sampled vocals only seem capable of simulating a choir in the background. To quote Alan Sherman: "When the choir sings behind you/ All they do is hummm (hummm)/Every voice is like an angel/Til one hum goes bum."
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 28 2011


I would think "impossible" is too strong, [MaxwellBuchanan], I would think you'll see it soon enough, though I'll grant you not quite yet.
-- theircompetitor, Oct 28 2011


I'm sure voice recreation will continue to improve. But, in the unlikely event that I went to listen to Adele, I'd be a bit upset if she appeared in the form of a memory stick.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 28 2011


//Stephen Hawking Sings the Blues// - I'd buy it. Incidentally, has anyone seen the Carl Sagan/Stephen Hawking duets on YouTube done with this sort of technique? - really excellent.
-- hippo, Oct 31 2011


Following twittersphere with the recent Siri outage you'd think someone is actually using the damned thing
-- theircompetitor, Nov 05 2011


Daft Punk, awesomely talented as they may be, weren't even the first; Trent Reznor did it on the NIN album 'Broken', Skinny Puppy (and subsequent Al Jourgensen projects) did it all the time, Ben Burtt sampled human voices to create sound effects for droids and other devices in 'Star Wars', and Jimmy Page sampled Robert Plant's vocals to weave into the sub-tracks of many of Zeppellin's studio albums. Get some good headphones and listen to 'The Song Remains the Same', 'Achilles' Last Stand', 'The Immigrant Song', etc. Also a strong feature of the 'Diva's Aria' in the film 'The Fifth Element'. There are as many fully-baked ways of doing this as there are artists who have done it. Sorry.
-- Alterother, Nov 05 2011



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