Updated…ACE is an AI music app that allows you to import MIDIA protocol for communicating musical information, such as notes and control signals, between electronic musical instruments and computers., add your lyrics, and do some editing to create a very useful realization of your choral music arrangementrefers to the structure and order of musical elements in a composition, such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and instrumentation.. They’ve added XML support and a variety of new voices, and is greatly improved since the first edition of this article.
In our testing of their XML import feature, it works really well and is competitive with other XML-supporting AI vocal platforms -but we did find a shortcoming in the XML standard. We noticed our XML-generated tracks did not sync with tempoThe speed at which a piece of music is performed, often indicated in beats per minute. changesJazz shorthand for Chord Changes; the chord progression (fermatas, specifically) when imported to our DAWDigital Audio Workstation. Some are: Ableton Live, FL Studio, Logic Pro X, Cubase, Pro Tools, Studio One, Reason, Reaper, Digital Performer, Bitwig Studio, Samplitude Pro X, GarageBand (Mac), Cakewalk by BandLab, Presonus Studio One, Tracktion Waveform (Logic Proacronym short for Publishing Rights Organization, such as ASCAP, BMI, SESAC X). Comparing the MIDI tempo list in Logic to the tempo references in the musicxml, we found that the musicxml filtered out more than half of them. Music XML doesn’t do rubato, or comprehensive tempo maps, making it a killer for production of dramatic pieces with rubato or fermatas. ACE has the advantage over other platforms such as Cantamus.app at this point, given their support for MIDI, and one-click lyric entry. For production, you need to have all the MIDI data from the source. Cantamus.app does not import MIDI.
ACE Studio resembles conventional Digital Audio Workstations in appearance and basic functions, with the addition of a variety of AI voices and vocal-specific editing features. The interface looks familiar to DAW users.
An online manual naming the areas and partsIndividual pieces of music, each designed to be performed by a single musician or section of an ensemble. of the user interface is here.
Creating a Virtual Choir with ACE (on the Mac)
Having done a couple of sessions with ACE, reconstructing a Choral recording from MIDI and Lyrics, we learned:
The interface is easy to navigate with a configurable 2-button mouse with a scroll wheel and thumb wheel (I have a Logitech MX-Master). Zooming in and out horizontally is controlled by scrolling with the scroll wheel while holding down the Mac Command keyThe group of pitches, or tonality, that a piece of music is centered around. (⌘). Vertical scrolling is done with Option (⌥) and scroll wheel. Side to side scrolling without Zoom is done with the thumb wheel. Up and down scrolling is done with the Scroll wheel with no modifier keys. Windows controls are here.
Wanting to create a Choral arrangement, we started by importing a file with 5 tracks of MIDI (SATTB). We noticed some issues with the tempo mapComponent in MIDI data defining the tempo and tempo changes in a musical piece or track – some tempo marks were out of position, but it was easy enough to slide a whole row of marks representing a pullback to the correct place relative to the notea symbol used to represent a specific pitch and duration grid. It’s worth double-checking the tempo map before rendering audio, if you can. The first time you play the track back, ACE will take some considerable time to render, assigning the syllable “da” to every MIDI note.
Lyrics
ACE does automatic hyphenation, so use a non-hyphenated version of your lyrics. Copy a big chunk (or all) of your lyric from a text or Word file. You can double-click the first note to activate the lyric function, then Paste (⌘v), then hit the Enter key (⌅). ACE will hyphenate and distribute your lyric to subsequent MIDI notes, becoming visible inside the notes as displayed in the Clip View area.
You’ll need to make a few adjustments for the occasional incorrect word breaks by the built-in AI interpreter, or to create melismas in your melodyA sequence of single pitches perceived as a unit, usually the main theme or tune in a piece of music.. Right-clicking (or Option-clicking) a note reveals the options to Move Lyrics Forward or Move Lyrics Backward. “Forward” means “to the left.” All subsequent lyrics follow. If you need to create a melisma, move the remainder lyrics backward accordingly, then go back to the held syllable, advance through with the Tab key and replace the “da” syllables with a hyphen (-), typing or pasting it when the note’s lyric field is highlighted. It can go very quickly.
When you type lyrics in, ACE is unusual in that to advance to the next syllable or note, you need to type the Tab key instead of the spacebar, which is normal behavior in notationA system of symbols used to write down music. apps. According to their support people, they might include a feature to pick which way to do that in app settings.
Phonemes
ACE uses the international Phoneme scheme to create the pronunciation of lyrics. After the lyrics are entered you can observe which phonemes have been chosen by ACE’s AI interpreter, showing just above the MIDI notes. Inevitably you’ll be changing some as you edit. It might help to print out their phoneme reference and keep it handy while editing.
After you activate any of the pitchThe perceived highness or lowness of a sound, determined by the frequency of the sound wave. editor tools at the top of the Clip window, you can see that the MIDI notes themselves show solid color areas, shaded areas, and lines. These represent the time allotted for the corresponding phonemes to unfold. If you want clearer consonants (for example), you’ll be increasing the darker area(s) in the note graphic which will give it/them more time to unfold.
Double up some consonant phonemes
We found that the most efficient way to solve vague enunciation issues is to double up some consonant phonemes, either by anticipating the following consonant, or repeating the previous end consonant at the start of a note. Some vocal teachers encourage students to do this – rather than sing “he went to the barA line that separates measures in sheet music.,” a singer would sing “he(w) went to(th) the(b) bar.” This works well in ACE Studio.
Increase the gaps between notes (all at once)
Another thing that works well is to increase the gaps between notes – especially with repeated notes.
You can do this all at once, by first clicking in the notes area, then select all, zoom in, and grab the right boundary of any of the notes, and move it a bit to the left. For this to work well, you’d first need to turn “Snap” off in the dropdown at the far left of the notes area. A very slight nudge helps do the trick.
Voice Parameters
Pitch Parameters
It’s easy to modify vibratoOscillation of tone produce by variation in pitch, dynamics, or both and pitch with the tools at top of the Clip View. The Vibrato tool creates vibrato where you want it, and the modulationThe process of changing from one key to another within a piece of music. tool reduces its amplitude when you don’t want so much. ACE does a really good job with pitch – you might want to edit it for special effect. I didn’t end up using the note splitter at all, and, at first, made the mistake of trying to moderate vibrato with the pitch tool. No, instead, the modulation and vibrato tools will be the ones to use most often.
Tone Character Parameters
It’s possible to edit vocal character with the tools in the Parameters section at the bottom. Select a note, and select a type (Air, Falsetto, TensionTemporary music dissonance or increased density, Energy, Formant) for further modification of the sound of the sung vocal. You can also insert breath breaks with the breath tools, or remove the breaths that have been automatically included. These parameters are particularly useful for humanizing a lead vocal – you can add a lot of pathos to the performance. You can also slide the notes around a bit to humanize phrasing.
Voice Selection
The included voices are very useful. You can create new voices from the existing ones using the Track Control Panel controls… clicking the + adds another voice to the track, which you can blend various ways and control panningthe process of adjusting the stereo positioning of a sound in a mix, determining its location between the left and right speakers. etc, then save the combination as a new voice if you like.
When right-clicking (or option-clicking) over a track in the Tracks window, we saw the option “Create doubles for this track.” This is a very powerful and useful feature that creates 2 more versions, with controllable degrees of similarity, altering pitch and the Voicemix (? don’t know what that is exactly). The effect is very choral, very quickly. You can even assign alternate voices to the copied tracks, change the panning, etc.
Transposition
Although we’d like to see some sort of global transpositionThe process of changing the key of a piece of music. tool, it’s possible without it. The only way we found to do it was go through track by track, marquee-select all the MIDI entries, and hit an up or down arrow key the number of times needed. Sometimes the marquee selection didn’t quite get all the pitches, but we were able to identify and fix the ones we missed. Even that manual process went quickly. We’d like to see a “select all” function in the MIDI editor panel.
Rendering
Another thing we found was editing went much faster with the particular track soloed. Without soloing the track, ACE will render all tracks that have any changes since the last render. Working on one track at a time and listening back to minor changes goes quickly.
Actions such as transposition or cloning tracks will cause the entire session to re-render on playback, and can take considerable time – especially after the track count is increased.
Creating a reasonable and credible sounding choral arrangement can go fairly quickly, but going for maximum realism will add time to the project. In the case of individual voices, or a lead vocal, depending on talent fees and your own hourly rate as the producer, it may be cheaper to hire a singer – but for total control of the sound, ACE is a very compelling tool. There are enough parameter controls and other editable features that ACE can be a powerful, believable vocal performance generator.
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