[Clam-devel] some preliminary fun with the vowel synthesizer and a question about the wiki

[abe kazemzadeh]

Hi All,

I just wanted to post some first baby steps I made when playing around with
the vowel synthesizer that David made (experimentalVowelSynth.clamnetwork in
the example data of the NetworkEditor).  The description is below, but since
it is longish I wanted to ask first about the wiki page I made for keeping
project notes: http://iua-share.upf.edu/wikis/clam/index.php/SoC_Wiki_Pages...
Is this an appropriate place to keep notes?  If there's a better place
let me know.

About David's vowel synthesizer, I had the idea of using natural voice
source (the vocal fold vibration) as an input to the vowel synthesizer
instead of the harmonic peak generator.  The natural voice source data comes
from a EGG (electroglottogram) at the USC phonetics lab, which measures the
opening and closing of the vocal folds.

It seemed like this would be hard to do, but after meeting with Xavier last
week, I realized it wasn't.  The main thing was learning how to use jack to
get the sound into clam, and the rest was rearranging a couple of the arcs
in the network.

The vowel synthesizer already has an audio input, which is used to compare
the user's formants (spectral envelope) with the synthetic one (as in the
case of using the synthesizer to practice the vowels of a foreign
language).  I just unplugged the harmonic peak generator and plugged the
input's spectral peaks (from the SMSAnalysisCore0's third output) into the
vowel resonator.  Then I played the EGG data (which is in wav format) with
xmms and routed it into the vowel synthesiser.  The result sounded a bit
more natural than the original, but this may be because of the natural pitch
and duration modulation rather than the actual EGG input (the EGG input is a
measure of the opening and closing, which has the same pitch as the acoustic
source but is not the same thing).  It also sounds a bit funny because the
data is supposed to come from sentences said with a given emotion.

I put the data at http://sail.usc.edu/~kazemzad/EGG/only_source/ and the
network at
http://sail.usc.edu/~kazemzad/EGG/clam/experimentalVowelSynth_from_EGG.clamnetwork.
 Well, let me know if you have any feedback about this or the wiki
location.

Thanks,
Abe
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