Thursday, July 12, 2007

The magic of modern synthesis


I just learned about a public-domain-music-download site hosted by Novos Aires of Spain, but what strikes me as significant about this one is that the scores are not in PDF format but rather in Harmony Assistant format, which has a free plug-in which can play, transpose and print the music.

Here's the cool part. When you play it, the synthesized voices actually sing the syllables of the text. It might not sound like a real choir, but that's a huge leap above the usual synthesized "choral aahs" you hear from a notation program. The program comes with language interpreters for British English, American English, Latin, French, German, Italian, and a half-dozen other languages. I can't vouch for the accuracy of these pronunciations (I only listened to Latin pieces), but still, that's an amazing accomplishment, and enormously useful.

And if that's not cool enough, Harmony Assistant only costs $70. Sure, it might not be as full-featured as Finale or Sibelius (and not much easier to use, according to online reviews) or produce publication-quality scores, but in terms of value for the money, that's hard to beat. As with most software nowadays, you can download a trial version which doesn't save or print.

I was also pleasantly surprised at the ease of use of the browser plug-in you need to view it. Finale and Sibelius both have plug-ins for viewing their files, but I find they're always hard to use (and the Finale one, in particular, is obnoxious because it requires you to give them a pile of personal contact information in order to download the "free" viewer).

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