A year ago, Danish signal processing specialists TC Electronic joined up with Canadian IVL Technologies Ltd. to announce the formation of TC Helicon Vocal Technologies, a new company focusing on the development of vocal processing tools. TC Electronic has long been associated with cutting-edge studio tools, and IVL has largely operated in the background, developing products for other companies. For example, IVL was involved in the development of DigiTech’s award-winning Vocalist Series harmony processors, TC’s acclaimed Intonator pitch corrector, DSP technology in Mackie’s digital 8-bus console, and numerous projects in the gaming and other markets.

“Back in 1990, when we started out, we were limited in DSP horsepower, and we decided to confine ourselves to time-domain techniques for vocal processing,” says IVL’s chief technical officer Brian Gibson. “By the mid-’90s, things were changing radically in terms of available processing power, and we decided to throw off the shackles and do research into some new products—some pretty sophisticated stuff using 100 MIPS DSPs.”

Unveiled at last fall’s AES show in Los Angeles, TC Helicon’s first product was VoicePrism, an all-in-one box voice formant and pitch processor that includes mic- and line-level inputs, compression, gating, dual fully parametric EQ, four-voice harmony (with individually adjustable gender controls and humanizing parameters), fifth lead doubling voice for automatic double-tracking, and two separate post-effects blocks with chorus/flange, delay and reverb and harmony libraries. “It’s been a while since we came out with a major upgrade in the area of vocal processing, which is why the VoicePrism is so much better than anything we’ve done before,” Gibson explains. “But the most exciting stuff is our next-generation technology involving physical modeling.”

VoicePrism’s simple interface and excellent vocal effects made it a hit at the show; however, one of the unit’s most important features—a socket for an expansion daughter board—was almost entirely overlooked. Slated to ship this month are the VoiceCraft Human Voice Modeling Card and the VoicePrismPlus (essentially the VoicePrism with the card pre-installed). “VoiceCraft is the result of several years of research into doing vocal processing in a different way,” Gibson continues, “modeled on real singers and incorporating some of those things into a physical model, such as pitch, glottal effects, inflection and formant manipulation.”

Vocal modeling is not exactly new. In fact, research and development of voice models has been around for years in the telecommunications industry. However, the real difference is a matter of quality—assembling voices to read back phone numbers from automated directory assistance is a far cry from creating professional-quality voice manipulation that holds up to studio standards. The first professional implementation of Voice Modeling™, the VoicePrismPlus Human Voice Modeling Formant Processor expands the VoicePrism’s lead vocal processing with real-time reshaping and resynthesis of the human voice. It includes numerous parameters for tweaking the lead vocal input, such as the ability to add breath, growl, rasp, head and chest resonances, inflection or vibrato, along with TC compression, EQ, studio effects and digital I/O.

Reprinted with permission from Magazine, March, 2001
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