Prior to this, I'd been experimenting with pitch-shifting the output of Google's Text-to-Speech service (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech), which was quite interesting and somewhat pleasant sounding for spoken word vocals, but didn't really have the range or expressiveness I was looking for more generally.
What really sold it to me was listening to some beautifully crafted covers from this YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX0lcVr9ugI
Prior to this, I'd been experimenting with pitch-shifting the output of Google's Text-to-Speech service (https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech), which was quite interesting and somewhat pleasant sounding for spoken word vocals, but didn't really have the range or expressiveness I was looking for more generally.