Wolfgang Palm has introduced PPG Phonem – a new software synthesizer, for OS X & Windows, designed for expressive vocal synthesis.

The human voice is a very complex system, which can produce a wide range of sounds. It is however restricted by natural physical dimensions. Phonem does not impose limits, letting you create all the filter configurations and sweeps you could only ever have dreamed of.

Here’s a video intro from Wolfgang Palm:

The heart of the Phonem system is a multi resonator filter with 12 individual resonators, which can produce vocal sounds as well as all kinds of filter sweeps and effects. This is combined with a very flexible excitation source which can work as a simulation for the human vocal source (the glottis) but also use wavetables and time-corrected-samples (TCS) to drive the filter.

Although the PPG Phonem was originally designed to do just vocal synthesis, it turned out that the system is also capable of producing a wide range of synthsizer sounds. So Palm extended the parameter ranges and made everything accessible to the user, to take advantage of this fact.

Here are a series of video demos for Phonem:

PPG Phonem Factory Sounds Demo 1 

PPG Phonem Factory Sounds Demo 2

PPG Phonem Examples

PPG Phonem Performance Example

Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi on Phonem

Features:

• Create your own singing style
• Create your own expressions
• Large Phoneme inventory – 46 english/american plus 5 german plus 4 french phonemes
• Versatile excitation generator/oscillator
• Working with typical voice source or wavetable and time-corrected-samples (TCS)
• Extreme time stretching, freezing and reversing
• Pitch track – let your robots sing
• Control track – let it cry and shout
• Song mode – making it easy to compose your synthesized text
• Wave page – create your own wavetables and modify time-corrected-samples
• All internal parameters available to the user – give your voices a special dialect or individual character
• Versatile matrix system – allowing 19 sources to control 40 parameters
• Two X/Y control pads freely routable to 40 parameters
• 6 Envelopes, for control of filter sweeps, waveform, noise and many modulations
• 4 LFOs plus Vibrato, Flutter and Growl generators
• Fully programmable resonator filter – allowing production of new sound effects
• Delay/Reverb effect
• Overdrive/Distortion effect
• Directly accessible context help for each module
• Freely configurable schematic keypad, with extremely expressive modulation options
• Ribbon controller to bend the pitch to variable intervals
• 5 Keyboard Modes including mono, legato and voice-per-channel.
• Import WTS and TCS files from WaveGenerator or WaveMapper 2

PPG Phonem is available now, priced at 119 €. See Palm’s site for details.