Shirley Portis Cloning Project
My mother had an exceptional mezzo soprano voice. She studied opera and vocal performance at the University of Oregon in Eugene. As a professional composer/music producer I did not relate artistically with her style. She had a fairly heavy vibrato and sang mostly contemporary religious music. However, as we both grew older, I realized I had never recorded her in a professional setting. The only recordings we had of her singing were a couple of extremely scratchy 75-year old vinyl discs. When I offered to record her toward the end of her life, it became clear that she was no longer able to sing at a high level or for any length of time. Sadly, I had missed my chance.
Enter A.I.
It is now possible to clone a singing voice with a high degree of accuracy. I have been learning how to create a voice clone by experimenting with my own and other voices, in particular my mother’s. Below is a sampling from one of the songs she recorded four or five years before I was born, ironically, since it’s her rendition of “Danny Boy.” A major concern of mine has been keeping my work with her voice away from public access so that is does not get misused. Fortunately, I have discovered the tools to experiment in a way that is safe and controlled.
Song Collection
As a result, I have begun to envision a major composition project that would feature my mother’s voice in an original collection of neoclassical pieces (see a recent example of a self-published neoclassical album here). As a profoundly personal endeavor, this project would honor her legacy in a way that would be uniquely my own and that would tie my musical legacy to hers – by making original professional recordings of her voice available to friends, family and the general public.
The Process
This is a work in progress as I continue to learn how to utilize cloning resources and techniques. Those resources are constantly evolving (often weekly and sometimes daily). My goals are: 1) to recreate Mom’s voice as accurately as possible while also making the words distinguishable, 2) to reproduce her voice at the highest fidelity possible and ultimately 3) To feature her voice on my original compositions with the help of one or more singers that I will coach to perform in a style that was like my mother’s. The final step will be to replace the live singer’s performance with Mom’s cloned voice.
There are several places where siblance, artifacts and distortion occur in the tracks below. Over time, I hope to be able to address these issues. Track #3 is my first attempt at combining Mom’s original performance with another singer’s performance of the same song. The diction is more pronounced, but it also introduces some artifacts along with performance elements which were different from my mother’s – such as exaggerated scoops/falls (which she did not like), different vibrato speeds and very different phrasing. These are all idiosyncricies of the individual singer. The clone depends on the performance of the guide track to recreate the performance. What is actually cloned is what I would describe as the tone/attitude/(sometimes) accent of the original voice. The other aspects of the cloned performance are heavily dependent on the “guide” track performance. In order to recreate Mom’s performance most accurately, I will need to bring in a vocalist who is capable of singing in her style – which was fairly conservative and operatic. My goal is to get closer to the performance on track #2 with improved diction. (Click the “i” details button beside each track to get information about the recording.)