Emulating human performance in orchestral software?

Question

I recently bought *Garritan Personal Orchestra* and find it a great tool to get professional-sounding orchestral renders of my scores. However, I feel a certain lack of "human" playing in it, i.e., chord changes sound a bit "robotic" at times and longer notes are perfectly sustained for long periods of time (they do not decay), which makes the performance sound a bit too computer-generated. I understand professional musicians and film score makers use such software on a regular basis, yet they obtain much more human sounding results. Is there a trick to making the score sound less "computer-generated"? What can I do to make the results appear closer to human performance?

Answer 1

This is a great question! In order to make computer-generated music sound "musical" it has to have human characteristics such as vibrato, dynamics, articulations, and others. It helps to record music digitally using a velocity-sensitive midi instrument such as a keyboard. If you are a trained or natural musician you will automatically inflect the music with dynamics and articulations. You might also want to use the modulation control on the midi instrument to add vibrato when holding notes, the way one would when singing or playing an acoustic instrument. Whenever I do recording digitally I spend a lot of time editing the midi data, adjusting timing, note lengths, dynamics, crescendos/diminuendos, and vibrato to make it sound as natural as possible. Garriton sounds are among the best I've ever tried for acoustic instruments, so that's a good place to start. It is really hard to get natural sounding synthesized sound for some instruments, such as strings, oboe, and some others, so search the internet for the best ones you can afford. But that's only the start: editing the midi data is almost always necessary to add the human touch. It also helps to use a natural reverb at the right level. You also need to place the instruments in the stereo spectrum where they can be heard. For example, if you've inputted midi data for an entire orchestra, you need to put the 1st violins to the left, the contrabassi to the right, the woodwinds in the middle, etc., or the orchestra won't sound real. Above all, think like a musician/conductor! It's a lot of work but you can go a long ways to making synthesized digital music sound real by using these techniques and anything else you can muster.