Bones is a free voice bank for the also free Alter/Ego voice synthesizer by Plogue. Bones is a low and warm male voice, and was created by Tyler Koziol who recorded his own voice, did the programming and even drew the character design.
Bones replaces the earlier Daisy as the default free voice for Alter/Ego (with Daisy “returning to her own time stream”), which means the currently available voices are Bones and ALYS, a French-Japanese singer. Four more female voices have been announced and are currently in development.
Bones sounds smoother and more natural than Daisy did. It is capable of singing in English or Japanese, as well as talking in English. Using phonetic data, he can also attempt other languages, and can even do Polish intelligibly, although with a definite American accent. The talking mode is a new addition that was introduced in the upgraded version of Alter/Ego, which was also released today. It is very easy to use – simply enter the text and hold down a MIDI note to “read” it. Changing the note to a higher or lower one controls inflections, whereas the wave rate and phoneme speed controls affect the speed of the speech.
As a singer, there are a few things Bones doesn’t do too well – sounding like a good female singer is one of them, and screaming rock vocals are another. With a lot of parameters to tweak and automate, though, Bones is capable of anything from natural sounding singing to creepy whispers, spacey pads and wobbly dubstep basses. Singing “normally”, Bones sounds like this:
And pushing the parameters to extremes and automating a couple of them, here’s a short clip I made of Bones attempting a dubstep bassline.
Bones and the required Alter/Ego update can be downloaded from Plogue’s website (235 MB download size, ZIP archive, contains 1 sound bank for Alter/Ego). Bones also has a Twitter account.
