Project #01.3 : TransVoice Table

Idea

The main idea of the Trans­Voice Table project is the devel­op­ment of a flex­i­ble soft­ware struc­ture which allows the imple­men­ta­tion of map­ping strate­gies between three dif­fer­ent modal­i­ties: voice (through micro­phones or data­base con­tents) and ges­tures (through sen­sors embed­ded on mov­able objects) thanks expres­sive voice trans­for­ma­tion algo­rithms. The main con­text of this work is dig­i­tal scenic arts, and more pre­cisely con­tem­po­rary the­atre with tech­no­log­i­cal contributions.

 

Daniel Danis Daniel Danis — Photo © DansLe­Brouil­lard — Jan, 2008

 

Moti­va­tions

In the con­text of con­tem­po­rary the­ater, the role of tech­nolo­gies (and more pre­cisely sig­nal pro­cess­ing) in the exten­sion of nar­ra­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties is not a really explored topic. One of the rea­sons is that wide and expres­sive voice mod­i­fi­ca­tions, which is the inter­est­ing mate­r­ial in order to build coher­ent nar­ra­tive trans­for­ma­tions, are par­tic­u­larly com­plex to imple­ment, and much more in real­time or quasi-realtime. How­ever, recent inves­ti­ga­tions on voice qual­ity dimen­sion­al­ity and related issues in analy­sis and syn­the­sis let us con­sider that highly expres­sive tool­boxes could be pro­to­typed in envi­ron­ments like Max/MSP and inte­grated in scenic sit­u­a­tions in a rea­son­able period of time. A col­lab­o­ra­tion with the author Daniel Danis, which has already deeply worked in inter­ac­tion with voice, has been ini­ti­ated . His instal­la­tions, which already con­tain a lot of inter­ac­tive objects and map­ping pos­si­bil­i­ties, can be updated with new voice trans­for­ma­tion tech­niques in order to pro­pose new nar­ra­tive canevas.

 

Results

The project report is avail­able as well as its ref­er­ence entry .

 

Demos

In this video, we can see a sub­set of the mod­ules that have been devel­oped for Trans­Voice Table. Actu­ally it analy­ses a real­time voice sig­nal, and record pitch-synchronous into a par­tic­u­lar buffer. Then the con­tent of this buffer is resyn­the­sized with dif­fer­ent prosodic
para­me­ters with the help of a graphic tablet plugged in the system.