Chipspeech

About

The software is used for creating vocals for use within music. Chipspeech is designed to produce vintage style vocals from synthesizers that were used by the music industry in the 1980s. The vocals therefore are not meant to sound realistic and are more suited for sound experimentation. It works as a Text-to-speech method. Users type the lyrics in and receive instant play back results which was a capability beyond the original soundchips the software vocals are based on. The software is as simple as Vocaloid. Though English and Japanese come as standard, other languages can be created by direct entry of syllables. Though human-like vocals can be achieved, the results are always machine like rather than man-like. It is capable of different synthesis methods or re-samplers. In addition for 1.032 version of the software a new "Speak and Spell" program was added creating the circuit bending feature.

Chipspeech itself as created as a result of research for Chipsounds by Plogue in the 2000s. David Viens himself would often collect Soundchips even if there was no need for them. This obsession eventually lead to further events which created the Chipspeech software after he spent the years hacking, protoboard making, probing, and reverse engineering of speech chips. He noted that the software's main goal was to be a singing emulator and not a text-to-speech software. The source data of each vocal is 8 kHz or 10 kHz. Despite all their effort, the project came to a halt. Hubert Lamontagne came to the Plogue company with knowledge of phonetics, Hubert took interest in creating a vintage sounding synthesizer, he designed the synthesizer to work beyond being a sound library.

It originally came with 7 "characters" upon purchase, more vocals have been added since and continue to be added. These characters come with their own backstory and are based on a sound synthesizer. Recreation of these voices was done with permission from their respective license holders. Plogue itself gained rights to the speech data from three TI-99/4A games (Alpiner, Parsec and Moon Mine), and the internal vocabulary of the TI Speech Device. The process of gaining right for the vocals took over 10 years, as the company did not want to desrespect the copyright holders even when met with issues such as the license holder having gone bankrupt. And while the technology was easy to emulate, the data needed for the emulation was not.

In Jan 2016, Plogue announced that Hubert Lamontagne had found a way to improve quality. On February the 9th, Vers. 1.066 was released. This fixed bugs with Deeklatt and Otto Mozer. Voice improvements to Dandy 704 and Bert Gotrax were scheduled for the next release and were updated in 1.072. Some vocals such as Dandy 704 are restricted by how far they can be improved. In addition, Chipspeech will be receiving the ability to talk as well as well as sing in its next major update. Chipspeech also was exported to Japan during June 2016.

Version 1.5 was released on 16th of September 2016 adding talk capabilities, a growl adjustment and two new vocals "Rotten.ST" and "CiderTalk'84" based on the 16 bite era vocals.

Official Albums

An official album was created featuring the software. The album is titled " chipspeech AUTOMATE SONGS .01" and includes a cover of the song Stakker Humanoid using Otto Mozer, whose vocal is an emulation of the same synethiser used for the samples taken from the game Bezerk.

Characters

The vocals are split between 8 characters, in addition, Daisy from Alter/Ego could be imported into the software;

Reception

Reception to the software was mostly positive. It won 3 Computer Music awards; Editor's Choice, Performance and Innovation. The software was described as a polished product at their MusicRadar review and noted as "tons of fun to use".

AskAudio in their "Voice of the Machines" review focused on the fact that with the raise of Autotuning software, a human is always required. Chipspeech allowed a nostalgic approach to vocal synthesizing with its resulting vocals coming purely from a computer. It listed the positives of the software as " Incredibly unique, fairly easy to use, sounds excellent, affordable" but noted as its main weakness was how the software strained the CPU.

CDM, who had been given exclusive early access to the software, also highlighted how "boring" modern synthesizers had become and focused on the "fun" that the software provided. One of its highlighted merits of the software was how rare some historical chips it aimed to recreate had become.

In August 2016, Chipspeech topped the virtual instrument top 25 rankings at Sonicwire, owned by Crypton Future Media, beating their Vocaloids products such as Hatsune Miku which normally dominated their rankings.