Performative voice synthesis for edutainment in acoustic phonetics and singing: a case study using the "Cantor Digitalis"

Lionel Feugère (1) , Christophe d'Alessandro (2) , Boris Doval (3)

1 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur
2 Audio Acoustique
3 DALEMBERT - Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert

A real-time and gesture controlled voice synthesis software is applied to edutainment in the field of voice pedagogy. The main goals are teaching how voice works and what makes the differences between voices in an interactive, real-time and audio-visual perspective. The project is based on "Cantor Digitalis", a singing vowel digital instrument, featuring an improved formant synthesizer controlled by a stylus and touch graphic tablet. Demonstrated in various pedagogical situations, this application allows for simple and interactive explanation of difficult and/or abstract voice related phenomena, such as source-filter theory, vocal formants, effect of the vocal tract size, voice categories, voice source parameters, intonation and articulation, etc. This is achieved by systematic and interactive listening and playing with the sound of a virtual voice, related to the hand motions and dynamics on the tablet.

Mots clés: edutainment; voice synthesis; performative synthesis; graphic tablet

Domaines: Son [cs.SD]; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]; Linguistique; Musique, musicologie et arts de la scène; Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Acoustique [physics.class-ph]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Lionel Feugère, Christophe d'Alessandro, Boris Doval. Performative voice synthesis for edutainment in acoustic phonetics and singing: a case study using the "Cantor Digitalis". 5th International ICST Conference, INTETAIN 2013, Jul 2013, Mons, Belgium. pp 169-178, ⟨10.1007/978-3-319-03892-6_20⟩. ⟨hal-00932116⟩