Voice Split channel node

The Voice Split CHOP takes an audio track and separates “words” out into different channels.

See also: Phoneme, Voice Sync

The Voice Split CHOP takes an audio track and separates “words” out into different channels. A word is defined as audio volume above the silence level for a certain period of time, followed by a period of silence. The name of each channel is specified by the Channel Names parameter.

This CHOP is normally used in conjunction with the VoiceSync CHOP to create a phoneme set. Phonemes are recorded in one audio track with pauses between each phoneme. This CHOP separates the phonemes into channels, and allows each phoneme to be named.

Parameters

Voice Split

Silence Level

Any audio below this level is considered silence, otherwise it is considered to be a word.

Min Pause Length

The minimum amount of time that the audio must be silent for a pause to be detected.

Min Word Length

The minimum length of a word.

Channel Names

The names of the channels created from the audio track(s). If there are more extracted words than names, names will be recycled and incremented (ie. word, word1, word2, etc).

Common

Some of these parameters may not be avaiable on all CHOP nodes.

Scope

To determine which channels get affected, some CHOPs have a scope string. Patterns can be used in the scope, for example * (match all), and ? (match single character).

The following are examples of possible channel name matching options:

chan2

Matches a single channel name.

chan3 tx ty tz

Matches four channel names, separated by spaces.

chan*

Matches each channel that starts with chan.

*foot*

Matches each channel that has foot in it.

t?

The ? matches a single character. t? matches two-character channels starting with t.

r[xyz]

Matches channels rx, ry and rz.

blend[3-7:2]

Matches number ranges giving blend3, blend5, and blend7.

blend[2-3,5,13]

Matches channels blend2, blend3, blend5, blend13.

t[xyz]

[xyz]matches three characters, giving channels tx, ty and tz.

Sample Rate Match

The Sample Rate Match Options handle cases where multiple input CHOPs’ sample rates are different.

Resample At First Input’s Rate

Use rate of first input to resample others.

Resample At Maximum Rate

Resample to highest sample rate.

Resample At Minimum Rate

Resample to the lowest sample rate.

Error if Rates Differ

Does not accept conflicting sample rates.

Units

The units for which time parameters are specified.

For example, you can specify the amount of time a lag should last for in seconds (default), frames (at the Houdini FPS), or samples (in the CHOP’s sample rate).

Note

When you change the Units parameter, it does not convert the existing parameters to the new units.

Time Slice

Time Slicing is a feature which boosts cooking performance and reduces memory usage. Traditionally, CHOPs calculate the channel over its entire frame range. If the channel does need to be evaluated every frame, then cooking the entire range of the channel is unnecessary. It is more efficient to calculate only the fraction of the channel that is needed. This fraction is known as a Time Slice.

Unload

Causes the memory consumed by a CHOP to be released after it is cooked and the data passed to the next CHOP.

Export Prefix

The Export prefix is prepended to CHOP channel names to determine where to export to.

For example, if the CHOP channel was named geo1:tx, and the prefix was /obj, the channel would be exported to /obj/geo1/tx.

Note

You can leave the Export Prefix blank, but then your CHOP track names need to be absolute paths, such as obj:geo1:tx.

Graph Color

Every CHOP has this option. Each CHOP gets a default color assigned for display in the Graph port, but you can override the color in the Common page under Graph Color. There are 36 RGB color combinations in the Palette.

Graph Color Step

When the graph displays the animation curves and a CHOP has two or more channels, this defines the difference in color from one channel to the next, giving a rainbow spectrum of colors.

Usages in other examples

Example name Example for