Cantai, the MuseSounds library that sings your lyrics
Cantai is a MuseSounds library that sings the lyrics you write under the notes in MuseScore Studio. It is made by Turing Opera Workshop, and you can get it on its own or with a MuseSounds Pro subscription.
Below you can hear the opening of Mozart’s Ave verum corpus played three ways. Then see how Cantai differs from Muse Choir and the sampled choirs, how to enter lyrics it sings well, and whether to buy it or subscribe.
Voices and choirs for MuseScore Studio
How Cantai works
Cantai is a singing synthesizer that plays inside MuseScore Studio. Type words under your notes, and it sings those words at the pitches, rhythms and dynamics written in the score.
Most choir libraries are recordings. Singers were recorded holding vowels or a set list of syllables, and the library plays those recordings back when you press play. Cantai uses machine learning to synthesize the voice instead, so it can pronounce the text you type rather than pick the closest recording. That is also why the whole library is an 11 MB download, while the free Muse Choir takes about 0.64 GB.
Cantai includes four solo voices, soprano, alto, tenor and bass, as well as choir ensembles. You can write an aria for one voice or a four-part anthem in the same library.
Because the voice is synthesized, Cantai has to render your score before it can play it. When your computer’s processor is fast enough, it renders locally, with no limit. Otherwise it renders online, with up to 180 minutes of online rendering a week, reset every Monday. Rendering starts automatically as you write, so a long editing session can use those minutes quickly. Sections that have already rendered keep playing after the limit is reached. To save minutes, you can switch to manual rendering, as the MuseScore Studio handbook explains.
Cantai, Muse Choir and sampled choirs
MuseHub has several choirs for MuseScore Studio, and they do different jobs. The difference is what happens to the words you type.
Muse Choir is free, and it is where most people start. It was recorded with 40 singers holding sustained notes and true legato intervals on a range of vowels, with and without vibrato. It also has staccatos, staccatissimos and marcatos, from pianissimo to fortissimo. It gives you a full choral sound for any four-part writing. It sings vowels, so the words in your score stay on the page.
VOXOS Epic Choirs, from Cinesamples, was recorded at Bastyr Chapel in Seattle. It has a full mixed choir, a boys choir, a boy soloist and a soprano soloist. Its 30 recorded syllables, for staccato and sustained notes, are chosen through the lyrics you enter. Lyric playback works on the Men, Women and Full Chorus presets and needs MuseScore Studio 4.4 or later.
Chorus, from Audio Imperia, is a 48-piece choir with full, male and female sections. It has sets of recorded Latin-style syllables in traditional, energetic and slow styles, and the lyric you enter picks the syllable and whether it ends with an S. It also includes more than 120 choral effects, such as risers and loops.
With VOXOS and Chorus, the lyric points to a syllable someone already sang. That suits cinematic writing, where a choir chants a few strong sounds over an orchestra. Cantai pronounces the text itself, so it can sing a whole verse of a hymn or a motet as written. Choose Cantai when the words matter. Choose a sampled choir when you want the weight of a large recorded ensemble.
You can also mix them. The Mixer assigns a sound to each instrument, so Cantai can sing a solo line over Muse Choir in the same score.
| Library | Maker | What it sings | How you get it | In MuseSounds Pro |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cantai | Turing Opera Workshop | The lyrics you write, synthesized | Bought, its own monthly plan, or MuseSounds Pro | Yes |
| Muse Choir | Muse Group | Vowels, with legato and short notes | Free | — |
| VOXOS Epic Choirs | Cinesamples | 30 recorded syllables, chosen by your lyrics | Bought, or MuseSounds Pro | Yes |
| Chorus | Audio Imperia | Recorded Latin-style syllables, chosen by your lyrics | Bought, or in the Audio Imperia Bundle | No |
For choirs outside MuseScore Studio as well, see the best choir VSTs and plugins.
Hear Cantai sing Mozart
The clearest way to hear what Cantai does is to give it a text and compare it with libraries that cannot sing one. We took bars 3–10 of Mozart’s motet Ave verum corpus, K. 618, where the choir enters after the two-bar instrumental introduction, and kept only the four choir parts, with the Latin text entered as lyrics. The strings and organ are left out. Then we played the same bars in MuseScore Studio three times, changing only the sounds:
- MS Basic, the soundfont that comes with MuseScore Studio. It plays the choir parts but does not sing the words.
- Muse Choir, the free MuseSounds choir, which sings on vowels.
- Cantai, which sings the words.
The tempo, the mixer, the reverb and the export settings stayed the same each time, all at their defaults. Of the three, only Cantai sings the text.
Look at the score before you listen. Mozart marks the piece Adagio and sotto voce, “under the voice”, which asks for a hushed, quiet tone. The excerpt starts at the choir’s entry, so there are no opening rests. The four voices move mostly together, so each syllable lands in every part at the same moment. The text in these bars is “Ave, ave verum corpus, natum de Maria virgine”, which in English is “Hail, true body, born of the Virgin Mary”. Read the words along the soprano line and imagine them sung slowly and quietly, then press play.
1. MS Basic
First, the soundfont MuseScore Studio uses until you install anything else. Its choir sound does not change with the text. Listen for where one word ends and the next begins, and notice whether the four parts blend into one sound or stand apart.
MS Basic sounds good and realistic here. It does not sing the words, so the text stays on the page.
MS Basic
2. Muse Choir
Now the same bars with Muse Choir, recorded with 40 singers on vowels. Pay attention to how the voices connect from one note to the next, since the library was recorded with true legato intervals. Then follow the text in the score again, and notice what you hear in place of the words.
Muse Choir also sounds good and realistic. It does not sing the words either.
Muse Choir
3. Cantai
Finally, Cantai. The notes and the lyrics are the same as before, and only the sound has changed. Listen for the words first. See whether you can follow “Ave verum corpus” without reading along, and notice where the consonants fall against the beat. Then compare the four parts, and notice whether each one sings the same syllable at the same moment, as the score has them.
Cantai is the only one of the three that sings the words, and it sings them clearly. The voice still sounds a little like AI.
Cantai
Only the library changed between these three renders. That is not how a finished mock-up is made. A real one adapts the score to the library, for example by adjusting how the lyrics are split across the notes, because each library responds a little differently to the same markings.
How to write lyrics Cantai can sing
Cantai sings what you type, so the lyrics are part of the performance. You enter them the standard way in MuseScore Studio.
- Give each voice its own staff. Write soprano, alto, tenor and bass on four staves, and add lyrics to each one, so every part carries its own text.
- Select the first note of a part and press Ctrl+L (Cmd+L on macOS). A lyric cursor appears under the note.
- Type the first syllable. Press Space when the word ends, and the cursor moves to the next note.
- Type a hyphen to split a word into syllables. MuseScore Studio moves to the next note and draws the hyphen between them. “Ma-ri-a” takes three notes.
- Type an underscore when one syllable lasts over several notes. This is a melisma, and MuseScore Studio draws an extender line under the held notes.
- Press Esc when the part is done, then move to the next staff.
Split words the way the published edition does. A choral edition already shows where each syllable falls, and copying it keeps the words on the notes the composer set them to. Cantai sang the Latin text in the Mozart example above. Check your spelling, too, because Cantai pronounces what is written.
Cantai renders as you write, so a long session of lyric entry can use online rendering time. If your computer renders online, switch to manual rendering while you type the text, and render once the part is finished.
Who Cantai is for
Choral composers. Hearing the text sung shows how your setting treats it. You can hear where the stressed syllables fall, whether a word sits on a long or a short note, and how the four parts line up on each syllable.
Church musicians. A hymn, an anthem or a psalm setting can be played back with its words. Pair Cantai with an organ for the full service sound. Muse Pipe Organ and Spitfire Audio’s Union Chapel Organ are both in MuseSounds Pro.
Teachers and choir directors. A rehearsal track with the words lets singers practice the notes and the text together. Solo one part in the Mixer and export the audio, and each section has a track of its own.
Anyone writing for solo voice. The four solo voices let you hear an art song or an aria with its text before a singer sees it.
Get Cantai on its own or with MuseSounds Pro
There are two ways to get Cantai, and both install through MuseHub.
Get it on its own. Buy it once and keep it, or subscribe to Cantai alone by the month. The product card shows both prices in your store.
Get it with MuseSounds Pro. Pro is a subscription that includes 34 of the paid libraries, Cantai and VOXOS Epic Choirs among them. It costs CHF 16 a month or CHF 158 a year, and there is no free trial. It also includes both organs above, Vienna Symphonic Library’s orchestral sections and Spitfire Audio’s Symphony series. If you cancel, the Pro libraries stop working at the end of the billing period, and any library you bought separately keeps working.
If Cantai is the only library you want, get it on its own. Its monthly plan costs less than Pro, and buying it pays off if you will sing with it for years. If you also want an organ to accompany it or an orchestra to write for, Pro covers them together. What is MuseSounds Pro? lists everything in the subscription.
Get started with Cantai
- Create a free MuseHub account, then download and install MuseHub on Windows or macOS.
- Install MuseScore Studio from MuseHub if you don’t have it yet.
- Open the MuseSounds section and install the free libraries. Start with Muse Keys, the most downloaded MuseSounds library, which gives you a piano for accompaniments and rehearsal reductions. Add Muse Choir to compare with Cantai.
- Get Cantai on its own, or start MuseSounds Pro, and install Cantai from MuseHub.
- Restart MuseScore Studio if it was already open.
- Open a score with voice parts, add the lyrics, then open the Mixer and choose Cantai in each voice’s Sound row.
- Press play to hear the part sung.
On Linux, MuseSounds Manager installs the free MuseSounds, and Cantai is not among them. How to use MuseSounds in MuseScore Studio walks through the Mixer step by step.
FAQ
Next steps
Enter the lyrics in one of your own choral scores and play them with Cantai. If you are new to the libraries, what are MuseSounds? explains how they read a score. To start with the free choir and the rest of the free set, read the complete guide to the free MuseSounds. You can browse every library in MuseSounds on MuseHub, or download MuseHub free.
