Personal Speech Synth Project

Some information on my singing speech synthesis side project, inspired by VocalWriter.

It is built around Articulatory Synthesis and built in GameMaker Studio 2. (Though I might have to switch to a different engine in an attempt to get quicker render times...)

Progress is a bit stagnant as there's a few difficult hurdles I'm not sure how to properly tackle.

It's nowhere near complete, but I thought it would be nice to log my progress down, and hopefully it can be interesting to read too.

Info ordered newest to oldest

February 19, 2022

Got a pretty decent system going for parsing through text. The kind of thing that inputs "TALK" and outputs "T:AH:K"

It's a complex script that checks each character and compares the other characters around it to figure out what sound it would make. It's not perfect but it can interpret basic words pretty accurately.

Look, it's either this or programming an entire dictionary. Doesn't help that the English language can be wacky as hell. why cant i just say langwij.

September 2021 - January 2022

Been working on other projects but I'm still working on this from time to time. Voice synthesis is still the same but I'm working on other features of the program itself. Switching tabs, piano roll scrollbar, and placing notes in the piano roll works fairly well. (Before this, I'd hard-code it in the engine itself.)

Along with that it can now save and load a song as a file!

September 4, 2021

No actual words, but a fairly realistic female vowel sound. I suppose vibrato makes voice sound better.


August 30, 2021

A video showing off the program (now singing more than one vowel!!). Singing the scale, the voice is understandable, but it is missing sounds like d, f, s, pretty much anything that isn't a vowel.

August 28, 2021

One of my earliest recordings of the program, paired with a snazzy UI too. Just the eee vowel but it was very exciting to know that I can render a human-like voice.

August 25, 2021

Generating a saw wave out of sine waves, and showing off a bit of the math behind it. I thought it looked neat.