Interactive Training Blog

By Rudy Helm, Audio and Quality Assurance Tech, Visual Purple, LLC.

This writing is a follow-up to a promise I made at the end of my previous blog ‘Emulating Human Voice-overs with TTS Voices’. For now, consider this proposition — what if your project’s background music (BGM) had these characteristics:
· copyright free
· royalty free
· original composition
· authored by you!

Does this appeal to you virtual-world developers of cutscenes, trailers or Machinima projects? Moreover, if you consider yourself a non-musician, then this should certainly be happy news for you! It’s true that being musically inclined can be a boon to this process, but there is no reason why a non-musician can’t generate some musically useful results.

I thought that this exercise would be a fun opportunity to exhibit two musical styles and apply them to the same animation sequence (not at the same time, of course!). The first exhibit will portray a rural cafe where the clientele would be people who appreciate country music. The second exhibit, while actually the same animation, let’s pretend is a ‘blue-collar’ cafe where the clientele would appreciate, um…, ‘roadhouse rock’ (whatever that is – let’s use our imagination!). In keeping true to my past themes of NPC VO, our YouTube animations embedded in this blog will star synthetic actors with synthetic speech as foreground elements (and which have been synced to the phrasings of a prerecorded human model; click here for a refresher on the technique). With this test-scene we utilized only 1 TTS male voice to cover a small cast of 2 adult males.

I borrowed the animation sequence from one of our past projects and the original voice-over tracks were actual professional VO talent. For these exhibits, however, I replaced the VO with TTS voices reading scripts I made up off the top of my head. The Country script and the Roadhouse script are largely nonsense, so please don’t strain yourself too hard trying to make sense of it (although I did try very hard to keep the lip sync to match the syllables). The original voice track may have expressed some confidential things (it was a training project), so it was prudent to make up nonsense TTS chatter and replace the original speech. Remember. The intent of this study is to focus on ambient BGM production, and not the TTS actors! So let us begin.

First, I’d like you to listen to the musical elements my automated composer has generated for this test (click here for the roadhouse sample). Notice how realistic the electric slide guitar and backing instruments sound. People, we have come a long way in auto-generated music in just the last two years!

Now, please listen to the country sample. Notice how realistic the steel guitar player sounds. And yes, you non-musicians can do this, nearly effortlessly. And it is equally easy to deal with almost any musical style!

Next, view and listen to the animation sequence for both BGM scenarios. After that I will discuss the usage of the music tool and present some screen shots.

“- Link to”
YouTube Visual Purple Can Automated Music Play Nice in Virtual Worlds? #1
The Roadhouse Cafe example – note the effective emulation of the synthetic musicians. The slide guitar is very convincing.

“- Link to”
YouTube Visual Purple Can Automated Music Play Nice in Virtual Worlds? #2
The Country Cafe example – note that the steel guitar is very realistic. Also notice how well background sound effects and music work together.

Remember these numbers: 1-4-5 (say, “one four five”). These three numbers represent the three principal chords of any given musical key (in Western culture). The number 1 represents the tonality of the key’s foundation. If the key is the key of ‘C’, then ‘1’ informs musicians to play the ‘C’ chord. The numbers 4 and 5 represent two other complimentary chords in the key structure. Almost any combination of the 1-4-5 chords sound ‘right’. There now, you know all you need to know about music theory to proceed. Three chords are all it takes!

While there are a number of choices that can be made as to selecting software packages that generate automatic or algorithmic music, this tutorial will reflect a user interface as found in a tool available by Canada’s own PG Music. This company, I believe, has recently set the bar rather high. Their impressive technology now allows you to generate music where the output is actual human recordings. And at the price of a song (pun intended). While MIDI is still an available technology in this tool (good for Rave/Techno/HipHop, etc), we have the good fortune of not being locked in to MIDI-only renders. [To be continued]

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