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Vocal Riffs Model for Synthesis and Transformation

Title Vocal Riffs Model for Synthesis and Transformation
Publication Type Master Thesis
Year of Publication 2011
Authors Roig Garcia, C.
preprint/postprint document http://mtg.upf.edu/system/files/publications/Roig-Carles-Master-thesis-2011.pdf
Abstract Singing voice is one of the most challenging musical instruments to model. For decades, much research and study has been performed in order to synthesize and imitate it. The fruit of this labor was a large number of synthesizers. Among all these approaches, the sequential concatenation of samples from a database is the one that had most success. However, it has some weak points regard to the flexibility and expressivity. In addition, current systems designed for voice samples transformation, such as: transposition, timescaling, or resampling, among others, may cause a decrease in sound quality, and they do not allow lyrics modification. The goal of this thesis is to model, synthesize and transform Vocal Riffs: short rhythmic, melodic, or harmonic vocal figures charged of personality that provides the singer taste to a song. The modeling process extracts high level features from the target Vocal Riff and stores them as a template in a database. This template can be directly synthesized or transformed in order to create new Vocal Riffs. The software aspires to not lose sound quality during the transformation process, since the transformation is applied to the features in the template, instead of being applied to the sample. Furthermore, this fact allows other singing voice aspects to be modified, such as the lyrics, and provides flexibility to the usage of Vocal Riffs.