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I have a bunch of synths from Native Instruments, including Massive and Absynth. I currently control them using a midi keyboard and a midi controller, but I'd prefer to control them using my voice. For example, I wish to control the pitch and loudness of a soundscaped like sound from Absynth using my voice, where slight changes in pitch in my voice will be reflected in the pitch of the Absynth sound.

Additionally, say I have an idea for a string section for a piece of music I'm working on. I would like to be able to hum the section into a mic and in turn have it control a string instrument synth.

Perhaps its possible to convert voice to midi and feed the synth with midi, using the pitch bend to represent subtle changes in pitch. Perhaps Open Sound Control can be used.

What software is available which might help me to achieve voice control?

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If I understand you correctly, i.e. you want real-time audio to midi control, for that you'll need need a low latency audio to midi app or plugin. There are some options out there.

It goes without saying that real-time solutions aren't as precise as non real-time ones like, for instance, the industry standard Celemony Melodyne.

You can try the VST Pitch a Bitch. It's not free, but it's cheap, they claim it can detect pitch-bend and that you're able to trigger midi with it using voice.

Here's a synthedit freeware vst: audiotomidi

I haven't tried any of these myself so I cannot really say if they're any good or not.

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To answer the original question - There are a couple of products out there - I recently saw a video showing how to use Sonar X3 with Melodyne to do just that...

The problem is, most people aren't actually as accurate with their voice as they think and you rarely hit and sustain a note. At the start of the note you are usually off a bit. At the end you will sometimes drift. You can, however - fix this in software...

And that's the crux of the problem - by the time you correct the vocal recording, you might as well have recorded it on a piano roll or on a keyboard the way it's normally done.

Also, your voice can only do one note at a time - so recording anything but a simple melody is difficult.

It takes a bit of time to learn how to do that, but most of the people I know that have tried to compose the way you're talking come away disappointed.

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Native Instrument's "The Mouth" was designed expressly for that. But you have to use the presets. There might be user presets. I forget

http://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/effects/the-mouth/

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This might be interesting to you, our company Sonicsmith presented the Audio Controlled Oscillator chip and it's the driving core in our Audio Controlled Synthesizers. It plays it's two analog wave forms and at the same time converting them to pitch, ENV, gate and trigger CV outputs. It can also be arpeggiated while the main pitch is controlled from an audio input!

Just a note in case you consider working analog as well ;)

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