Latest news with #Orpheus
Irish Independent
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Sligo concert raises a fantastic €7,000 for local branch of Parkinsons Ireland
On April 29, the Hawk's Well Theatre hosted a unique concert, Voice of Parkinsons and Friends, a variety night featuring the Sligo Parkinson's Choir, with proceeds going to Parkinsons Ireland, North West Branch which helps people and families affected by Parkinson's in the local area. As well as music from the Sligo Parkinson's Choir, the sold-out show with MC Robert Fitzpatrick also featured performances from local comedian John Colleary, musicians Ray Coen and Steve Wickham, up and coming Sligo band Phoenix who were delighted to perform with Steve Wickham, music from Edel Fahy and the Drumcliffe Children's Choir. Along with raising awareness of the disease, the concert was also planned to fundraise to support people living with Parkinson's disease and to set up similar choirs elsewhere. The Sligo Parkinsons' Choir was set up in 2024 with the help of Miriam Cunningham, Fitness4All and Raymond Carty from the Orpheus choir in Sligo. Raymond invited friends from the Orpheus choir and Eunjoo Goh to help them prepare for their performance. Chairperson of Parkinsons Ireland Northwest Branch Kathleen Kennedy along with committee members Pat Benson and Kevin Fitzsimons put the evening together and were assisted on the night by David and Aisling Woods and many other family and friends. The Parkinsons Ireland Northwest Branch would like to thank everyone who supported the evening through donations, buying tickets, offering raffle prizes etc. A total of €7,000 was raised from the event.
Geeky Gadgets
3 days ago
- Geeky Gadgets
Professional Quality Voice Cloning : Open Source vs ElevenLabs
What if you could replicate a voice so convincingly that even the closest of listeners couldn't tell the difference? The rise of professional-quality voice cloning has made this a reality, transforming industries from entertainment to customer service. But as this technology becomes more accessible, a pivotal question emerges: should you opt for the polished convenience of a commercial platform like ElevenLabs, or embrace the flexibility and cost-efficiency of open source solutions? The answer isn't as straightforward as it seems. While ElevenLabs promises quick results with minimal effort, open source tools offer a deeper level of customization—if you're willing to invest the time and expertise. This tension between convenience and control lies at the heart of the debate. In this article, Trelis Research explore the key differences between open source voice cloning models and ElevenLabs, diving into their strengths, limitations, and use cases. From the meticulous process of preparing high-quality audio data to the technical nuances of fine-tuning models like CSM1B and Orpheus, you'll uncover what it takes to achieve truly lifelike voice replication. Along the way, we'll also examine the ethical considerations and potential risks that come with wielding such powerful technology. Whether you're a curious enthusiast or a professional seeking tailored solutions, this exploration will challenge your assumptions and help you make an informed choice. After all, the voice you clone may be more than just a tool—it could be a reflection of your values and priorities. Mastering Voice Cloning What Is Voice Cloning? Voice cloning involves training a model to replicate a specific voice for text-to-speech (TTS) applications. This process requires high-quality audio data and advanced modeling techniques to produce results that are both realistic and expressive. Commercial platforms like ElevenLabs provide fast and efficient solutions, but open source models offer a cost-effective alternative for those willing to invest time in training and customization. By using these tools, you can create highly personalized voice outputs tailored to your specific needs. Data Preparation: The Foundation of Accurate Voice Cloning High-quality data is the cornerstone of successful voice cloning. To train a model effectively, you'll need at least three hours of clean, high-resolution audio recordings. The preparation process involves several critical steps that ensure the dataset captures the unique characteristics of a voice: Audio Cleaning: Remove background noise and normalize volume levels to ensure clarity and consistency. Remove background noise and normalize volume levels to ensure clarity and consistency. Audio Chunking: Divide recordings into 30-second segments, maintaining sentence boundaries to preserve coherence and context. Divide recordings into 30-second segments, maintaining sentence boundaries to preserve coherence and context. Audio Transcription: Use tools like Whisper to align text with audio, creating precise and synchronized training data. These steps are essential for capturing the nuances of a voice, including its tone, pitch, and emotional expression, which are critical for producing realistic outputs. Open Source vs ElevenLabs Watch this video on YouTube. Gain further expertise in AI voice cloning by checking out these recommendations. Open source Models: Exploring the Alternatives Open source voice cloning models provide powerful alternatives to commercial platforms, offering flexibility and customization. Two notable models, CSM1B (Sesame) and Orpheus, stand out for their unique features and capabilities: CSM1B (Sesame): This model employs a hierarchical token-based architecture to represent audio. It supports fine-tuning with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), making it efficient for training on limited hardware while delivering high-quality results. This model employs a hierarchical token-based architecture to represent audio. It supports fine-tuning with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), making it efficient for training on limited hardware while delivering high-quality results. Orpheus: With 3 billion parameters, Orpheus uses a multi-token approach for detailed audio representation. While it produces highly realistic outputs, its size can lead to slower inference times and increased complexity during tokenization and decoding. When fine-tuned with sufficient data, these models can rival or even surpass the quality of commercial solutions like ElevenLabs, offering a customizable and cost-effective option for professionals. Fine-Tuning: Customizing Open source Models Fine-tuning is a critical step in adapting pre-trained models to replicate specific voices. By applying techniques like LoRA, you can customize models without requiring extensive computational resources. During this process, it's important to monitor metrics such as training loss and validation loss to ensure the model is learning effectively. Comparing the outputs of fine-tuned models with real recordings helps validate their performance and identify areas for improvement. This iterative approach ensures that the final model delivers accurate and expressive results. Open Source vs. ElevenLabs: Key Differences ElevenLabs offers a streamlined voice cloning solution, delivering high-quality results with minimal input data. Its quick cloning feature allows you to replicate voices using small audio samples, making it an attractive option for users seeking convenience. However, this approach often lacks the precision and customization offered by open source models trained on larger datasets. Open source solutions like CSM1B and Orpheus, when fine-tuned, can match or even exceed the quality of ElevenLabs, providing a more flexible and cost-effective alternative for users with specific requirements. Generating Audio: Bringing Text to Life The final step in voice cloning is generating audio from text. Fine-tuned models can produce highly realistic outputs, especially when paired with reference audio samples to enhance voice similarity. However, deploying these models for high-load inference can present challenges due to limited library support and hardware constraints. Careful planning and optimization are essential to ensure smooth deployment and consistent performance, particularly for applications requiring real-time or large-scale audio generation. Technical Foundations of Voice Cloning The success of voice cloning relies on advanced technical architectures that enable models to produce realistic and expressive outputs. Key elements include: Token-Based Architecture: Audio is broken into tokens, capturing features such as pitch, tone, and rhythm for detailed representation. Audio is broken into tokens, capturing features such as pitch, tone, and rhythm for detailed representation. Hierarchical Representations: These allow models to understand complex audio features, enhancing expressiveness and naturalness in the generated outputs. These allow models to understand complex audio features, enhancing expressiveness and naturalness in the generated outputs. Decoding Strategies: Differences in decoding methods between models like CSM1B and Orpheus influence both the speed and quality of the generated audio. Understanding these technical aspects can help you select the right model and optimize it for your specific use case. Ethical Considerations in Voice Cloning Voice cloning technology raises important ethical concerns, particularly regarding potential misuse. The ability to create deepfake audio poses risks to privacy, security, and trust. As a user, it's your responsibility to ensure that your applications adhere to ethical guidelines. Prioritize transparency, verify the authenticity of cloned voices, and use the technology responsibly to avoid contributing to misuse or harm. Best Practices for Achieving Professional Results To achieve professional-quality voice cloning, follow these best practices: Use clean, high-quality audio recordings for training to ensure accuracy and clarity. Combine fine-tuning with cloning techniques to enhance voice similarity and expressiveness. Evaluate models on unseen data to test their generalization and reliability before deployment. These practices will help you maximize the potential of your voice cloning projects while maintaining ethical standards. Tools and Resources for Voice Cloning Several tools and platforms can support your voice cloning efforts, streamlining the process and improving results: Transcription Tools: Whisper is a reliable option for aligning text with audio during data preparation. Whisper is a reliable option for aligning text with audio during data preparation. Libraries and Datasets: Platforms like Hugging Face and Unsloth provide extensive resources for training and fine-tuning models. Platforms like Hugging Face and Unsloth provide extensive resources for training and fine-tuning models. Training Environments: Services like Google Colab, RunPod, and Vast AI offer cost-effective solutions for model training and experimentation. By using these resources, you can simplify your workflow and achieve high-quality results in your voice cloning projects. Media Credit: Trelis Research Filed Under: AI, Guides Latest Geeky Gadgets Deals Disclosure: Some of our articles include affiliate links. 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CTV News
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Orpheus Musical Theatre's latest production, "The Music Man"
Orpheus Musical Theatre Managing Director J.T. Morris & Cast Member Lily Fletcher talk about their latest production, 'The Music Man.'
New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Dudamel Unveils a Love Letter to the Philharmonic
'Is there anything like that first strike of the bow?' Kate Soper asks at the start of her new piece for the New York Philharmonic. 'A hundred players moving as one! All that splendor, all that might!' She is describing the wonders of an orchestra, and you don't have to take her word for it. In Soper's sweet, clever 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus,' which had its premiere at David Geffen Hall on Thursday under Gustavo Dudamel's baton, the ensemble illustrates her words as she says them, 'Peter and the Wolf' style. 'The highs got higher, the lows got lower,' she says, explaining the development of instruments, and we hear ethereal pitches, then loud rumbles. 'Wood was lacquered,' she goes on, to delight in the oboe and clarinet. 'Metal bent' elicits a horn fanfare and trombone slide. Soper soon proclaims, with disarming plainness, 'That's right everyone: I'm Orpheus!' In this half-hour monodrama for a mostly speaking, sometimes singing soprano, she offers a tender retelling of the legend of the great musician of Greek mythology. Her story blends into a poetic reflection on music's meaning, what it can do (offer glimpses of the sublime) and what it can't (most anything else). Soper does all this in quirkily postmodern style. Her eclectic, quick-shifting sounds, including touches of memorably ancient-feeling bass flute, are woven into a quilt of quotations from famous settings of the Orpheus myth by Monteverdi and Gluck, as well as lesser-heard ones by Sartorio, Landi, Campra and others. There are also flashes of Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart and Grieg in the mix, and the text, mostly original, interpolates passages from Rilke's 'Sonnets to Orpheus.' Modern music lovers may be reminded of Luciano Berio's more chaotic collage 'Sinfonia.' For fans of Soper, especially in her composer-performer mode, 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus' will recall brainy, winsome works like 'Ipsa Dixit' (2016), which she began by posing the spoken question, 'What is art?' and attempted to answer through snippets of writers like Aristotle, Lydia Davis and Freud. Creating her first big orchestral piece, Soper has clearly understood she's writing for a broader audience; 'Orpheus Orchestra Opus Onus' is more immediately accessible than the fascinating but abstruse 'Ipsa Dixit.' Philharmonic programs don't tend to feature a lot of humor — certainly not of Soper's winking mash-up variety — and her voice is a whimsical change of pace as the season draws to an end. Dudamel, who becomes the Philharmonic's music director designate later this year before fully taking the reins in fall 2026, preceded the orchestra's latest commission with its first: Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, conducted by its composer at its 1946 premiere. It's better known at Lincoln Center these days as the score for one of George Balanchine's classic leotard works, regularly danced by New York City Ballet. Played by the Philharmonic on Thursday with confident panache, it, like the Soper piece, offered a love letter to the orchestra's range, from burly power to graceful delicacy: 'All that splendor, all that might!' Too bad those qualities were missing from the program's closer, Philip Glass's dreary 11th Symphony (2017). Glass's listlessly chugging symphonies are nowhere near his greatest achievements, but the 40-minute 11th is finding its way to major orchestras; Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony did it a few years ago. A grumbling beginning yields to characteristically swirling Glassian figurations in the strings — well played by the Philharmonic, the arpeggios precise yet warm. After mild lyricism in the second movement, the third unleashes a battery of percussion. In Glass's 1984 opera 'Akhnaten,' that kind of raucous drumming is an arresting evocation of antiquity. Here, it's busy bombast, without real thrill or power.
Sydney Morning Herald
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Robber barons and moonshine: This show about the road to Hades is a hell of a good time
MUSICAL THEATRE Hadestown ★★★★ Her Majesty's Theatre, until July 6 Ancient Greek and Roman myths involving the underworld tend to agree on the ease with which mortals can find the road to hell. In Anais Mitchell's folk-musical Hadestown – a retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, draped in a distinctly American mythos and musicality – the road becomes a railway line, and Hades a pinstripe-suited robber baron, whose train ferries denizens of jazz-age speakeasies to 'eternal overtime' in a factory at the end of the line. The other point on which the myths agree is how difficult the underworld is to escape. As Dryden put it in his translation of Virgil's Aeneid: The gates of hell are open night and day; Smooth the descent, and easy is the way: But to return, and view the cheerful skies, In this the task and mighty labour lies. We know that Orpheus will fail, that a fatal glance backward will condemn Eurydice to the underworld forever, but the tragic love story swells with every repetition and Christine Anu's Hermes – glam emcee in this steampunk adaptation – is determined they're going to tell it anyway. If Hadestown is too schematic to provide much emotional depth or tragic catharsis, it is musically superior to most Broadway blockbusters. This production delivers Mitchell's score (which started as a concept album and bloomed into a stage show) with propulsive catchiness and assurance. It's usually billed as a folk-musical, though the range of popular music referenced is much wider than that term suggests. Anu unleashes brassiness for the opening scene-setter, Road to Hell. Adrian Tamburini's Hades has a gravelly, embittered bass with dark country vibes going on – infernal shades of Johnny Cash or Nick Cave or even Tom Waits lurking in the low notes.
