Artificial Phonology: Disembodied Humanoid Voice for Composing Music with Surreal Languages

This paper examines some of the core techniques used to create an artificial phonological system for Sacra Conversazione, a short opera in five acts featuring human singers, artificially synthesized voices and complementary electroacoustic sounds. It introduces some of the most significant techniques for computer simulation and manipulation of voice used to produce materials for the piece, namely physical modeling, additive re-synthesis, PROSE and PSOLA. The author concludes with a discussion of lessons learned throughout the process of composing with such techniques.