Group singing, chant, prayer

I think there are a lot of issues to discuss on how this could be handled by the game.

I'm not just talking about singing in the sense of using your voice as an instrument, and outputting lyrics. I'm assuming ( hoping ) they'll be some way to attach lyrics to songs when you play them, so the lyrics can sync up with the melody, and, I would guess, you could do this in a group sync where everyone is singing the same lyrics. I suggested a long time ago in another thread there should be a singing text style for how this is handled.

But then there are a couple of other issues,

- How does this get outputted to the chat box if 5 people are singing? Will we have 5 repeat lines of the same lyrics by each of the 5 people that are singing? Or will there be something in the chat box that says "Group (singing): ♪ These are the lyrics to the song... ♪"

- Will there be a way for others who are not in the /play sync group to join in and sing to the lyrics of a melody being played? Lets say you have a gathering and ask everyone to sing or chant along, and some do so right away, and others want to join in mid-melody -- in the middle of the song. Obviously, for the chat box, they might be lumped into the "Group." But we'd also need to see the lyrics over their head. And if voice is an instrument, they have to join with the actual singing. And they'd a command to join in the song mid-melody.

- What about other types of group participation, when "(singing)" isn't appropriate, where it might be chanting, or when it might just be talking, for instance, prayer? How should the game let people do that?

 

Unless the current music formats can include lyrics there aren't going to be many options here.

Possibility.. have a separate, specially formatted file with the lyrics and include the ability in the /play command to play the music file and the lyric file at the same time. It would be up to the author of the lyric file to properly format it to a given song. There would need to also be a join command.

If on the other hand we're talking audio.. I personally think it would just be too impractical. I'm unaware of any text to speech technology that would sound good as singing. Alternatively we're either talking about allowing folks to stream audio directly into the game which would be difficult to sync in lag or have an audio file(s) which would have to be downloaded. But for group lyrics in the chat box of course you'd have to have some kind of text file for the game to import.

I'm rather partial to a lyric version of the music files. Otherwise if it's just one person it could be done with macros.

 

No I'm just talking about text lyrics, and outputting text lyrics in the game.

But if you played some QA releases you could also /play with your voice as an instrument at one point, but they didn't get in good audio for that. So I expect in the future we'll probably be having a voice instrument , but where no lyrics are actually articulated.

 

Just a thought,

"Group (in unison):" might be better than "Group (singing):" because its all purpose. Whether some individual or group is singing would be indicated by the text style as suggested in the link above -- sung text would be shown in italics surrounded by eighth note (♪) symbols in non-italic.

Ie,
Ravicus Domdred: ♪ Ho he ho he hum... ♪
Group (in unison): ♪ Ho he ho he hum... ♪