VöXX

Landing page
Input format selection
Main parameter selection
Mood selection
Rhythm selection

Team

Xueqi Zhang - Smith College '19 - Computer Science and Music Double Major

Brian Chen - Massachusetts Institute of Technology '19 - Mathematics with Computer Science Major

Dou Dou - Massachusetts Institute of Technology '18 - Mechanical Engineering and Management Double Major

Project Goal

VöXX is a tool that allows users to easily compose credible music with their voice regardless of their instrumental experience.

Our main target users are singers with less experience playing other musical instruments or composing sheet music. However, the tool is designed to work with users of all musical and singing background by allowing users to select how much “help” they want from the system.

Project Description

To start, the user selects a pre-defined rhythmic and chord progression template from a list of templates provided by VöXX to use as the background track. The user is able to choose whether they want to input a mood (happy, sad, epic etc.) which requires less musical background or a roman numerals of chord progression. The user has some control over the tempo, rhythm patterns and the instruments as well. VöXX will generate a background loop based on the user’s selection for their composition.

Then the user starts composing by singing into a microphone on top of a background looping track (generated based on the selections of the user)

The system then render the vocal input into midi information and record the midi output. The user is always able to hear the playback of the recorded file and change the rendering parameters: pitch correction, rhythmic correction, and instrument nob. Each parameter controls how much to render the original vocal input.

The tool will clean up the user’s singing and convert it to an instrument of the user’s choice and make credible music. Based on the users choice of how aggressively the tool converts the notes, the system can adjust the MIDI from leaving it untouched to snapping every note to the chord and quantize it.

The user decides to proceed with composing in the same track for the next few measures, or changing to a different track for different set of rendering options. The user can save the final composed product into local wav. or midi files.

Vision

We envision that VöXX can be a plug-in for other music software (Finale, Ableton Live, etc.) so that it is easier to turn musical ideas into midi information without manually typing notes on a score or playing the melody on a keyboard.

We envision that VöXX can be a performing tool that enable singers to perform orchestral sounding pieces or explore the relationship between human voice and traditional instruments.