Melismas

A melisma two or more notes assigned to a single syllable.

I’d noticed that one of the notes in one of my test songs had cut off early, and finally got around to looking into it, and noticed that I’d forgotten to implement them in the diphone code.

Correcting that was pretty trivial – it’s just a matter of extending the duration of the prior note.

Here’s the melisma in a phrase of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”:

The word “rain” is split between two notes.

And here it is in Praat (lyrics added with MS Paint):

The blue line in Praat indicates the pitch line.

The code that generates the pitch line currently runs before the positions of the phonemes are calculated. That will prove to be an issue if I’d like the phonemes to have an influence on the pitch line – changing the shape of the mouth for different phonemes generally triggers momentary pitch instability.

But there are are plenty of more basic issues to deal with first.