HN.zip

Chimera Vocal Synth

295 points by - 52 comments
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I came in cold and the first video made my day.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
That's awesome. Did you do that "by hand", or did you script Chimera to produce it?
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I had Claude read a PDF of the arrangement and then spent a few hours tweaking the performance to match how it actually sounded.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Hilarious! Thanks for sharing :)
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes, you did spend too much time on that, but it was worth it!
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Great! Now barbershop quartets are unemployed! Will it ever end?!?!

:-(

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Porn hasn't put sex workers out of business.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
There are fart simulators too now. People are having fun with this. https://x.com/childlandlord/status/2107960660860502171
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes but why do they all sound Indian? It's like hearing Apu singing :)
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
More like Stephen Hawking. Or the TTS shipped with a new Soundblaster cards in 1998. :)
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
There does seem to be a bug - if you drag the tongue to the bottom left-most position, close the lips and bring them back as far as possible, raise the larynx all the way, and lower the soft palate all the way, the synthesizer starts making some kind of inhuman screeching sound (which is definitely not physically accurate).

My best guess for why is that the simulation parameters are set up slightly wrong in a way that is mostly fine for normal simulations (not an audible amount of distortion) but quickly goes off the rails on weird cases like the aforementioned.

Overall a really nice app though; honestly I was kinda blown away by it.

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
This reminds me of that time researchers recreated the voice of the Pharaoh: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8qhrURrQbI
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I guess this is like a modern version of pink trombone - https://dood.al/pinktrombone/

Also is the name a Teto reference?

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
which is itself a version of research going back nearly 100 years.

e.g. the "Voder" by Homer Dudley - Bell Labs, 1939:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hyI_dM5cGo

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Was going to write about that too! The Wikipedia article is a fun read:

> This was a complex machine to operate. After months of practice, a trained operator could produce recognizable speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voder

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Yes, this reminds me exactly of pink trombone. Thanks for posting the link, I'll re-add it to my bookmarks.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I could see this being very useful in a number of applications.

Being trans, of course voice affirmation training.

Then singing comes to mind, followed by language learning.

A solid visual demo like this would help give people more than "okay now more like the a in aunt"

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
The next step is clearly real-time MRI so you can more easily match the reference: https://seeingspeech.ac.uk/ipa-charts/
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I pronounce it aunt but a lot of people pronounce it aunt.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Huh, that wouldn't have occured to me. Thanks for a new perspective!
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
[flagged]
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
You are.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Scrolling is an issue on iOS. Where my finger lands to scroll the page is captured by the head view. Took me a while to figure out how to get passed it.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
There was a post to a tweet about this but I also found there's a GitHub repo for the software and this link to it running!

Earlier tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50410728

GitHub repo: https://github.com/jamesondh/chimera-vocal-synth

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I learned to throat sing to put my baby to sleep. I'm having fun trying to figure out what all the shapes of the different mouth/throat components I make to get the same sound in the synth.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is the kind of experience I want on a Monday morning
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I can't work out how Klaus did the Mr. Sandman version.

Is that a modded version with 4 quartet singers at once?

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
That was very intriguing, I was able to tune the false vocal folds and adopt the proper anatomical positions and it did output a proper Khoomei overtone. I wasn't able to find the Kargyraa range, but I managed a decent Sygyt.

Damned impressive setup.

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I'm still trying to figure those out with my human vocal equipment. I'm impressed that you got this to do it!
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
love the op-1 vibe ui
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is weird and fun. Brings me back to one undergraduate class where we used the IPA a lot
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Time to figure out that damn Australian "o" by flapping the tongue about...

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zHeGKQxoOEg

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Next step: reverse engineer Freddie Mercury's glottal physiology from queen tracks and fourier analysis, pass it around as a VST plugin.

Please and thank you.

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder if the Freddie Mercury License ("Do whatever you want with my music, just don't make it boring") meets the OSI Open Source Definition
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Will make a great vocoder, once a mic is connected to it.

The vocal folds though? Lol

[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Is it not supposed to work on phone? All I hear is noise and engine keeps loading beyond 100%
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
It works on iOS for me
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Can't whistle?
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Not a vocalisation :)
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
The eye blink concerns me ...
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Can it do throat singing?
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Looks like there is no distortion in this simulation. Would be fun to play with different kinds of distortion as well
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
I love how creepy 3D view is.
[3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thanks, I hate it haha.