A method of singing voice synthesis uses commercially-available MIDI-based music composition software as a user interface (13). The user specifies a musical score and lyrics; as well as other music control parameters. The control information is stored in a MIDI file (11). Based on the input to the MIDI file (11) the system selects synthesis model parameters from an inventory (15) of linguistic voice data units. The units are selected and concatenated in a linguistic processor (17). The units are smoothed in the processing and are modified according to the music control parameters in musical processor (19) to modify the pitch, duration, and spectral characteristics of the concatenated voice units as specified by the musical score. The output waveform is synthesized using a sinusoidal model 20.