The Kyma Language for Sound Design, Version 4.5

III. Synchronizing the Analyses
At this point, you could do a morph, but because this is a speech example, there is one more step that can
make the morph work much better — that is to refine the time synchronization by looking at features in
the analysis itself. You can probably skip this step if you are analyzing single instrument tones or if the
two original samples are so different from each other that they don’t really have any corresponding features
that could be lined up. But in instances like this one, where you have two people speaking or
singing the same word or words, the synchronization step is essential.
1. Choose Synchronizing Spectra from the Tools menu. Read the instructions, and then click the Continue
button to start.
2. First, pick the guide spectrum, the one whose timing will not be warped. Click the Guide button, and
locate the analysis file called CMorph h.
3. Once the spectrum is displayed, scrub through it to get an idea of the time at which each phoneme
occurs. To scrub, you can either drag the yellow vertical line across the display with the mouse or use
pitch bend on your MIDI keyboard to move the yellow line. To make fine adjustments in the position
of the yellow line, use the left and right arrow keys on your computer keyboard. To remove a marker,
select it and press Delete.
4. The next step is to put a marker at the time point at which each “feature” occurs in the guide spectrum.
To put in a marker, position the scrub bar at the time when the feature occurs, and press the m
key on your computer keyboard.
♦ First scrub all the way to the left edge of the spectrum, and press m to put in a marker at the
very beginning of the file
♦ Scrub until you hear where the “m” first opens up into an “o”. Get close to the point, and
then use the right-arrow key to move right, frame-by-frame until you hear the “m” change.
Then press the m key.
♦ Scrub over to the “r”, which looks like the point at which the spectrum gets a little wider. Hit
m.
♦ Scrub over to the “ph”, and use the arrow key to find the point at which the pitch seems to
disappear. Put a marker here to mark the “ph”.
♦ Scrub to the end of the “ph” visually. Use the right-arrow to determine which frame makes
the transition from “unvoiced” to “voiced”. Mark it.
♦ Scrub to the end of the “i” and beginning of “ng”. Mark it.
♦ Mark the end of ‘ng”. You can see this one visually and also use the arrow key to find where
the voice disappears.
♦ Scrub all the way to the right edge, and mark the end of the file.
5. To save your work, press the s key. This will save the markers in the spectrum file. The cursor will
change to the pen to show that it is writing to the file, and the resynthesis will play at the end to show
that it has finished.
6. Now click the Warped button. Select the spectrum file whose timing will be warped such that all its
marked features line up with the marked features in the guide file. In this instance, we want the file
called KMorph h.
7. Mark all the same phonemes in KMorph that you marked in CMorph in step 4. Once you have finished,
double check that the markers on corresponding phonemes are of the same color in both the
guide spectrum and the warped spectrum. In other words, if the last marker is red in the guide, it
should also be red in the warped.
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