What will YOU make LEON sing?
Do you simply want him to perform your lyrical ideas as an aid to your songwriting process? Or will you use his freedom from human limitations to create stunningly innovative and experimental vocal effects? He can sing over a superb pitch range, he can sing much faster than a human could if you want him to, as fast as you like in fact, and he can jump any interval yet hit every note beautifully, IF that's want YOU want him to do. And he'll NEVER tire or complain.

In addition to singing any words or combination of syllables you can imagine, LEON will spread any sustained vowel (or voiced consonant) across as many notes as you like, with perfect legato. You can select from several different natural vibrato types and drag and drop your chosen type to any note or notes, and control the time-position and amount of the vibrato for superb expressiveness and realism.

And that's just the beginning! - you have control over all of the following parameters, which you can bring to bear on any part of your creation:

- Changing syllables/phonemes (e.g. enter "liddle" instead of "little" etc).
- Timing of each note (precise position/length).
- Vibrato (you can change its type/position/amount/frequency).
- Volume.
- Attack.
- Crescendo or diminuendo.
- Pitch bend (amount, and positionable in time).
- Glide (portamento).
- Resonance (Frequency/bandwidth/amplitude).
- Harmonics.
- Noise.
- Brightness.
- Clearness.
- Gender factor.
- And of course, you can even change the singer (if you have purchased and installed more than one virtual singer) - perhaps get LOLA or MIRIAM to sing your creation instead of LEON. Instantly.

LOLA Demo 1 -Little Bird (MP3)

How Does It Work? Why does LEON sound so real?
Few events have dramatically diverted the course of musical history. Synthesis, MIDI, Sampling - inventions of this magnitude are very rare events indeed. Singing Synthesis is such an event. Most acoustic instruments can be simulated well using various synthesis techniques, but (until Yamaha's Vocaloid techology came along) the singing voice resisted any serious simulation attempts. Hardly surprising, since singing has an extremely wide range of articulations, timbres, and transitions between sounds. And singing can communicate words as well as melody, which means you have a double layer of meaning, unlike other instruments. The human ear is so used to hearing the voice that even the finest tonal shifts or anomalies are immediately noticed. However, Yamaha's Vocaloid is in fact a totally new vocal-synthesis technology, achieving a much higher level of sophistication in this exciting area! The team at the Yamaha Advanced System Development Center in Japan has created software that emulates the singing voice with incredible accuracy.

Zero-G's development team have been working closely with Yamaha to create many 'vocal fonts' (virtual vocalists) for the Vocaloid system. The team starts each project by recording a professional vocalist singing literally all possible phonemes and transitions between syllables. Each transition is slightly different depending on the particular combination of phonemes, and these differences play a big part in how we understand words and whether a vocal track sounds natural or artificial. For example, the phoneme "p" sounds slightly different at the beginning of a word than it does at the end, and it affects the vowels next to it differently than, say, the phoneme "t".

The recordings of the professional singers are converted to the frequency domain using Fast Fourier Transform and divided into thousands of separate phonetic transitions which are processed in a unique way and then stored for use with the Vocaloid synthesis engine. Expressive tools such as vibrato, pitch bend, and attack are also derived from the real singing and stored separately.

To create a vocal track, you enter music and lyrics into the Vocaloid Editor (see screenshot). The melody can be entered by hand in the piano-roll style Editor or imported from a Standard MIDI File; the words are entered manually (either as words or as phonemes). Expressive elements can be imported from a MIDI File previously saved by the Vocaloid Editor, or entered via a graphic palette using drag-and-drop. Further detailed programming of expression parameters can be done graphically, for finely detailed results.

The data that you have entered in the Editor is sent to the synthesis engine, which fetches what it needs from the phonetic and expression databases to synthesize the track. To sing the word "part", for example, the software combines four elements from the phonetic database: "p" (as it sounds at the beginning of a word), "p-ar" (the transition from "p" to "ar"), "ar-t" (the transition from "ar" to "t"), and "t" (as it sounds at the end of a word). The two "ar" elements are blended together, and the resulting vowel "a" is lengthened as necessary to accommodate your chosen melody and rhythm.

Different pitches are derived by shifting the fundamental and overtones while leaving the vowel formants relatively untouched. The database elements were derived from phrases originally sung at different pitches, limiting the amount of shifting the engine needs to do (and therefore improving ultimate realism). A Pentium 4/ 2GHz computer takes less than one-third real time to render the track in the frequency domain and convert it into the time domain for use. For example, a 1-minute track can be rendered in less than 20 seconds.

Unlimited Horizons
The potential for Yamaha's Singing Synthesis Technology is virtually unlimited. LEON (together with his companion LOLA) are the genesis, the "Adam and Eve" of the new era of virtual singing. A third virtual vocalist, MIRIAM will take Vocaloid to new heights. Pretty soon you are going to hear synthesized vocals in a lot of music. Don't get left out of the picture. Experience the difference LEON can make for yourself!

VOCALOID LEON. Vocals without frontiers. The holy grail of synthesis. Enough make your heart SING.

Package Includes:
* VOCALOID Editor
* VOCALOID VST Instrument
* VOCALOID LEON Male Vocal Font

VOCALOID Editor Features:
* Vocal Edit & Synthesis environment.
* Piano-roll note editor
* Easy-to use lyric editing.
* Drag & Drop musical expression assigning.
* Reads VOCALOID vocal libraries.
* Synthesizing vocal tracks.
* Saving vocal data as wave files.
* Up to 16 vocal tracks.
* Standard MIDI File Input/Output

VOCALOID VST/ReWire Instrument:
* Reads VOCALOID vocal libraries
* Plays vocal MIDI tracks generated by VOCALOID Editor via VST- or ReWire-compatible host sequencer.
* Easy to manipulate voice characteristics

VOCALOID LEON Vocal Library (virtual soul vocalist):
* Complete male voice in English, in professional quality.
* Suits all soul and dance music styles, but also many other styles.
* Full coverage of phonemes. You can use any English lyrics you want.
* Vibrato templates and expression templates as typically used in natural singing.

Minimum System Requirements:
* Windows XP or Windows 2000
* Pentium III, 1 GHz or faster
* 512MB of RAM or more
* Approx 500 Mb Hard disk space or more (actual amount to be advised nearer release)
* CD-ROM or DVD-ROM Drive
* SVGA Display (1024x768)
* Sound Card with Microsoft DirectSound Compatible driver

Recommended System:
* Windows XP
* Pentium 4, 1.7 GHz or faster
* I GB of RAM or more

Supported Interfaces & Standards:
VST 2.0, ReWire, Windows MME.

Recommended Retail Price:
$329.95 US Dollars (289 Euros / 199.95 pounds sterling, including VAT)

Zero-G Product Code (SKU):
ZG-V2

Further background info, and earlier demos of the Yamaha technology in action, are available at the official Yamaha Vocaloid website, at www.vocaloid.com

All product specifications (including pricing) are subject to change without notice.
The names LEON, LOLA and MIRIAM are trademarks of Zero-G Limited.
ZERO-G is a registered trademark of Zero-G Limited.
VOCALOID is a registered trademark of Yamaha Corporation, Japan.

Availability:
THIS PRODUCT IS NOT AVAILABLE YET. It is scheduled for release in January 2004, and will be officially launched at the NAMM show in Los Angeles (15-18 January 2004).