Concatenative synthesis is a technique for synthesising sounds by concatenating short samples of recorded sound (called ''units''). The duration of the units is not strictly defined and may vary according to the implementation, roughly in the range of 10 milliseconds up to 1 second. It is used in
speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...
and
music sound synthesis to generate user-specified sequences of sound from a database (often called a corpus) built from recordings of other sequences.
In contrast to
granular synthesis Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale.
It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are split into small pieces of around 1 to 100 ms in duration. These small pieces ar ...
, concatenative synthesis is driven by an analysis of the source sound, in order to identify the units that
best match the specified criterion.
In speech
In music
Concatenative synthesis for music started to develop in the 2000s in particular through the work of Schwarz
and Pachet
(so-called musaicing).
The basic techniques are similar to those for speech, although with differences due to the differing nature of speech and music: for example, the segmentation is not into phonetic units but often into subunits of musical notes or events.
''Zero Point'', the first full-length album by Rob Clouth (Mesh 2020), features self-made concatenative synthesis software called the ‘Reconstructor’ which "''chops sampled sounds into tiny pieces and rearranges them to replicate a target sound. This allowed Clouth to use and manipulate his own beatboxing, a technique used on ‘Into’ and ‘The Vacuum State’."'' Clouth's concatenative synthesis algorithm was adapted from 'Let It Bee — Towards NMF-Inspired Audio Mosaicing' by Jonathan Driedger, Thomas Prätzlich, and Meinard Müller.
See also
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Granular synthesis Granular synthesis is a sound synthesis method that operates on the microsound time scale.
It is based on the same principle as sampling. However, the samples are split into small pieces of around 1 to 100 ms in duration. These small pieces ar ...
*
VOCALOID
is a singing voice synthesizer software product. Its signal processing part was developed through a joint research project led by Kenmochi Hideki at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, in 2000 and was not originally intended to b ...
*
UTAU
References
Speech synthesis
Sound synthesis types
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