Edit: The br phoneme is the phoneme used to indicate a breath. However, it is not implemented in all the voicebanks. For example, it’s in Saki AI (Lite), but not Eleanor (Lite). Also, there’s no documentation for this phoneme.
There is an Aspiration Output in the Pro version, but that appears to isolate the “whispered” portion of vocalized sounds so they can be mixed in the DAW, not actual breaths.
There’s a hack of using the hh phoneme, but it’s not optimal.
It’s possible to add just record breaths and add them in the DAW, but a breath phoneme inside Synthesizer V would be helpful in tuning the performance.
I’ve got the Eleanor (Lite) and Saki AI (Lite) voicebanks.
I see that the Eleanor voicebank doesn’t have the br phoneme, but Saki does. I’d actually tried the br phoneme, but only tried it with Eleanor. Why it’s not included (at least retroactively) in the Eleanor voicebank is an odd omission.
Since the Saki voicebank does have it, I guess I could set up a separate track for breaths in the editor. Still a bit of a kludge, but better than having to record the breaths myself.
Interestingly, stretching a breath too long leads to some metallic artifacts. (Interesting because Synthesizer V is quite good at avoiding rendering artifacts, so I hadn’t expected one here).
Since there is a breath phoneme, I’ll modify the top-level request.
Obviously, if you’ve got the Pro version of the editor (or are only using one voice), you can use another track to place the breaths on, and choose Mix Down to merge them onto a single track.
Since each Group can have a different Voice database, it’s possible to add breaths into the Eleanor Forte (Lite) using the Saki AI (Lite) voice in the same track:
Insert a note where the breath goes
Place .br in as the lyric, to specify the breath phoneme
Press Alt+g or right-click and select Merge Into Group from the context menu. The breath is now the single note in a new group.
Select Saki AI (Lite) from the voice panel to assign Saki AI as that group’s voice
