Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevebmark | Hacker News Reader

There's so much great stuff here:

- The state machine that seems to handle all edge cases, both in things like the tutorial and also in the procedural singing

- The animation, both the rigging (maybe these are bones?) and the spring physics. They blink randomly. Their eyes follow the mouse. Matching the mouths to the vowels and consonants is really well done

- The overall look and feel, including shaders, shadows, DOF, style, UI overlays

- The synthesizing of a human voice with vowels and consonants in a fairly convincing way. Choir synths for music production can run for thousands of dollars

- The real time harmonizing in a seamless way.

- And on top of all that, it works on all device sizes. It actually runs better on my phone than my laptop, probably due to large monitor size (the bane of any WebGL project).

Fantastic

With a little mouse wrangling, you can get them to do a fairly good rendition of counterpoint: https://g.co/arts/feoYyFonGVXicfk47

Even the small things, like the eyes going into a hypnotic trance when the blob is keenly following the blob to their right (our left).

Yep. I dabble in orchestral music, and was floored that this thing had simple articulations. Entry-level chorale libraries sometimes only have bare vowels, and this thing just... works.

There's a small delay while the other singers catch up to the harmony changes of the lead that makes it sounds more natural, it's a nice a touch.

> Choir synths for music production can run for thousands of dollars

Do you have an example? Why are they so expensive, are there no community projects in existence?

I don't know of any "choir synths" that run to thousands of dollars, but there are plenty of sample libraries that cost hundreds of dollars.

I'd guess this is procedurally generated. Different tech.

The graphics are delightful, but the vocals are actually quite crude compared to what's possible, even without any ML.

Two technologies called FOF and PSOLA have been around for decades, and can sound not unlike this.

And it works perfectly on the phone too.

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