Sibilant

Chart II Pulmonic consonants

A voice is a set of decisions.

Sibilant builds a speaking model from a consented reference session, then keeps the decisions the speaker already made: where the tongue lands, how the release breaks, what the breath does in between.

Every session is recorded with the speaker in the room and a signed grant on file. No grant, no build.

What a voice is made of

Speech is a small set of gestures, repeated the same way every time. Place of articulation runs across, manner runs down. A build learns how one speaker performs this grid, not an average of everyone who ever has.

Pulmonic consonants, after the International Phonetic Alphabet. Where a cell holds two symbols, the left is voiceless and the right is voiced. Hatched cells are articulations judged impossible; plain empty cells have no symbol in this section of the chart.
Manner of articulation Bilabial Labiodental Alveolar Postalveolar Velar Glottal
Plosive p b No symbol t d No symbol k ɡ ʔ
Nasal m ɱ n No symbol ŋ Judged impossible
Fricative ɸ β f v s z (the sound this studio is named for) ʃ ʒ x ɣ h ɦ
Approximant No symbol ʋ ɹ No symbol ɰ Judged impossible

Voiceless left, voiced right Hatched judged impossible Marked alveolar fricative, which is where the name came from

How a build runs

Three appointments. The speaker is present for the first and the last.

  1. Reference session

    The speaker reads a script that covers the grid above: every place, every manner, both voicings, then running prose so the model hears the joins rather than a bag of isolated sounds.

  2. Build

    We fit a model to that one speaker and nobody else. No pooled corpus, no timbre borrowed from a neighbouring voice to fill a gap the session did not cover.

  3. Review

    The speaker hears the output before any client does, on the same monitors the session was cut on, and signs off on it or does not.

Bring us one speaker who said yes.

Tell us the work and the language, and we will tell you what a reference session would need to cover.

A person replies. There is no queue.