Virtual Singer SAMPA Notation

Introduction

In phonetics, there are two main systems of notation for describing how a language is pronounced: IPA and SAMPA. These two notation systems are common to all phoneticians.

With IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), each phoneme matches a symbol. Unfortunately, the set of phonetic symbols cannot be typed on a computer keyboard.

SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet) is a notation derived from IPA that can be typed on a standard computer keyboard. The ASCII character set is used in SAMPA. Up to two characters may be needed to represent a phoneme.

Virtual Singer uses the SAMPA notation.

Implementation

In song lyrics, you can replace a syllable with its SAMPA equivalent. After the syllable, enter [# (an opening square bracket, then #). This tells Virtual Singer to replace the syllable with the SAMPA characters between [# and ]. If you enter non-SAMPA symbols in the brackets, they will be ignored.

For example:

            "Another yacht" will be written in SAMPA (UK English pronunciation) "@nVD@ jQt"

You can then type: "Another[#@nVD@] yacht[#jQt]" to produce the same result.

 

Note: If you are reluctant to use the SAMPA notation, don't forget that you can also use normal notation to replace a syllable. If a syllable is followed by text written between square brackets, without the # character, it will be replaced by that text.  This is generally sufficient, and much simpler than using SAMPA.