6,312 research outputs found
Mandarin Singing Voice Synthesis Based on Harmonic Plus Noise Model and Singing Expression Analysis
The purpose of this study is to investigate how humans interpret musical
scores expressively, and then design machines that sing like humans. We
consider six factors that have a strong influence on the expression of human
singing. The factors are related to the acoustic, phonetic, and musical
features of a real singing signal. Given real singing voices recorded following
the MIDI scores and lyrics, our analysis module can extract the expression
parameters from the real singing signals semi-automatically. The expression
parameters are used to control the singing voice synthesis (SVS) system for
Mandarin Chinese, which is based on the harmonic plus noise model (HNM). The
results of perceptual experiments show that integrating the expression factors
into the SVS system yields a notable improvement in perceptual naturalness,
clearness, and expressiveness. By one-to-one mapping of the real singing signal
and expression controls to the synthesizer, our SVS system can simulate the
interpretation of a real singer with the timbre of a speaker.Comment: 8 pages, technical repor
The Sound Manifesto
Computing practice today depends on visual output to drive almost all user
interaction. Other senses, such as audition, may be totally neglected, or used
tangentially, or used in highly restricted specialized ways. We have excellent
audio rendering through D-A conversion, but we lack rich general facilities for
modeling and manipulating sound comparable in quality and flexibility to
graphics. We need co-ordinated research in several disciplines to improve the
use of sound as an interactive information channel.
Incremental and separate improvements in synthesis, analysis, speech
processing, audiology, acoustics, music, etc. will not alone produce the
radical progress that we seek in sonic practice. We also need to create a new
central topic of study in digital audio research. The new topic will assimilate
the contributions of different disciplines on a common foundation. The key
central concept that we lack is sound as a general-purpose information channel.
We must investigate the structure of this information channel, which is driven
by the co-operative development of auditory perception and physical sound
production. Particular audible encodings, such as speech and music, illuminate
sonic information by example, but they are no more sufficient for a
characterization than typography is sufficient for a characterization of visual
information.Comment: To appear in the conference on Critical Technologies for the Future
of Computing, part of SPIE's International Symposium on Optical Science and
Technology, 30 July to 4 August 2000, San Diego, C
Reconstructing intelligible audio speech from visual speech features
This work describes an investigation into the feasibility of producing intelligible audio speech from only visual speech fea- tures. The proposed method aims to estimate a spectral enve- lope from visual features which is then combined with an arti- ficial excitation signal and used within a model of speech pro- duction to reconstruct an audio signal. Different combinations of audio and visual features are considered, along with both a statistical method of estimation and a deep neural network. The intelligibility of the reconstructed audio speech is measured by human listeners, and then compared to the intelligibility of the video signal only and when combined with the reconstructed audio
Fractionally-addressed delay lines
While traditional implementations of variable-length digital delay lines are
based on a circular buffer accessed by two pointers, we propose an
implementation where a single fractional pointer is used both for read and
write operations. On modern general-purpose architectures, the proposed method
is nearly as efficient as the popularinterpolated circular buffer, and it
behaves well for delay-length modulations commonly found in digital audio
effects. The physical interpretation of the new implementation shows that it is
suitable for simulating tension or density modulations in wave-propagating
media.Comment: 11 pages, 19 figures, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Speech
and Audio Processing Corrected ACM-clas
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