VisualVox polyphonic 0.9

Installation

Simply extract the zip file and move the .vst file to your personal vst plugin folder (e.g. Library/Audio/Plugins/VST/). Then restart your host application and if needed, rescan your vst plugins.

Getting started

The main concept of VisualVox is very simple: Load it as a synthesizer plugin, click "Load audio" and open a wav or aiff file of your choice. Then manipulate it and save it by clicking "Save audio" to your harddisk. You always have the possibility to hear your changes by using the buttons "play" and "stop". In later versions it will be easily possible to synchronize the audio to your host project to eliminate the need to export it as an own file all the time.

Mode selector

On the left you find a dropdown which says "Polyphon mode" per default. It is important to change the mode to monophonic mode in case of monophonic voice recordings etc. and to the choir mode if you want to manipulate choir recordings. Always please keep in mind that changing the mode will rescan all notes and thereby discard all manipulations you made before. You can always manually rescan by clicking "Rescan notes".

The notes

As soon as you have loaded your audio you can play the single isolated notes by simply klicking on them. In the upper right of the notes window you find a slider which allows to zoom in and out in the time domain. The notes window comprises only one octave which means that a note that goes out of the window to the top will continue from the lower edge.

Note manipulations

The most important way to manipulate notes is simply to drag it with the mouse to another semitone of the grid. By using the slider "Fine-tuning" you can shift the note freely between the semitone steps.
All parameter sliders like "Fine-tune" only affect the note(s) you have selected before.
The slider "Volume" allows to change the volume of individual notes or to completely mute them, f.e. to remove them from a chord.
The sliders "Raw contours" and "Fine contours" allow to make the frequency curve of a note more straight locally or more globally, which is meant by "fine" and "raw".
The slider "Freq. legato" allows to set how smooth the transition between two adjacent notes shall be that are shifted indiviually in different amounts. As the frequency-curve is always visualized immediately the exact function of this slider is best to be tried out.
The sliders "Vibrato ampl.", "Vibrato freq.", "Vibrato attack" allow to create an artificial vibrato for a note.
By changing the parameter "Formant stretch" you can play around with the formants of an individual note to change its timbre characteristic.
The slider "Fade In/Out" allows to let an individual note fade in or out over time.
You can also double a note to create artificial voices by choosing "Duplicate notes" or "Voice double" from the manipulate dropdown. The voice double will have artificial frequency deviations to make it sound more individual whereas the duplicate of notes are exact copies.
You can cut a note into pieces by utilizing the scizzors found in the lower right corner of the notes view.
Also, you find a pencil tool there which allows to freely draw frequency curves for individual notes.
The two dropdowns for harmonics extraction allow to isolate only single harmonics, e.g. partial components, of notes. The "Extract from" dropdown enables you to set the first partial to be extracted whereas the right dropdown ("All harmonics" per default) sets the number of partials to be included. A little example: If you choose "From 2nd" on the left and "3 harmonics" on the right you will extract harmonics 2,4,6 which are the frequency components of a tone which have the 2 fold, 4 fold and 6 fold base frequency.

Please note that you can only delete doubled notes, which are recognizable by their yellow color. If you delete a normal note, it will simply be muted but it will stay in the notes view in case you want to get it back later.

Algorithm sliders

The sliders on the left side of the plugin allow to optimize the performance of the algorithm for a particular kind of audio. The slider "Tone recognition" sets how sensitive the program is for recognizing individual notes. The parameter "Partial removal" determines how radical the algorithm tries to remove all partials from the list of individual notes. The slider "Tone extraction" strongly determines the sound quality by setting the frequency range that is applied to isolate an individual note from its neighbours. The slider "Overall volume" multiplies the audio output of the plugin with a constant value to adjust the volume.