{"id":4484,"date":"2015-05-29T06:36:59","date_gmt":"2015-05-29T06:36:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revoscience.com\/en\/?p=4484"},"modified":"2015-05-29T06:36:59","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T06:36:59","slug":"speaking-in-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/speaking-in-song\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaking in song"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sing-a-long software developed at A*STAR brings sweet melody to any cacophonous cry.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\"Copyright<\/a>
Copyright : Modified, with permission, from Ref. 1 \u00a9 2014 International Speech Communication Association<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Whether you give it your best \u2014 or worst \u2014 effort, I2R Speech2Singing technology will make you sound like the melodious singer you\u2019ve always wanted to be. The voice synthesis software developed by A*STAR researchers is the first to deliver high-quality singing automatically, while still preserving the original character of your natural voice.<\/span>

\u201cMany people like singing but they lack the skills to do so,\u201d says Minghui Dong who led the research at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research. \u201cWe want to use our technology to help the average person sing well.\u201d<\/span>

Speech consists of three key elements \u2014 content, prosody and timbre. The content is conveyed using words, the prosody \u2014 or melody in the case of singing \u2014 is expressed through rhythm and pitch, but the timbre is that distinctive quality that makes a banjo sound different from a trumpet, and one singer\u2019s voice from another\u2019s. I2R Speech2Singing works by polishing melody, while retaining the original content and timbre of a sound[1].<\/span>

Existing technologies that focus on correcting melody try to align off-tune sounds either to the closest note on the musical scale or to the exact note in the original score. The former works well for professional singers who may only be slightly out of tune, but cannot fix drastically off-key singing or simply reading out loud. The latter is better at correcting discordant tunes, but ignores many other aspects of melody such as vibrato and vowel-stretching.<\/span>

Instead, I2R Speech2Singing uses recordings by professional singers as templates against which to correct the melody of a singing voice or convert a speaking voice into a singing one. The software detects the timing of each phonetic sound using speech recognition technology, and then stretches and compresses the duration of the signal using voice conversion technology to match the rhythm to a professional singer\u2019s. A speech synthesizer then combines the time-corrected voice with pitch data and background music to produce a beautiful solo.<\/span>

\u201cWhen we compared the output with other applications in the market and in research, we realized that our software generated much better voice quality,\u201d says Dong.<\/span>

Singaporeans were first introduced to the software in 2013 through \u2018Sing for Singapore\u2019, part of the National Day Parade 2013 mobile application (see image). And in 2014, I2R Speech2Singing won the award for best Show & Tell contribution at INTERSPEECH, a major global venue for research on the science and technology of speech communication.<\/span>

Dong and his team are now working to improve the accessibility of the software and to add a feature that allows users to tune their singing as they wish.<\/span>

The A*STAR-affiliated researchers contributing to this research are from the Institute for Infocomm Research.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sing-a-long software developed at A*STAR brings sweet melody to any cacophonous cry. Whether you give it your best \u2014 or worst \u2014 effort, I2R Speech2Singing technology will make you sound like the melodious singer you\u2019ve always wanted to be. The voice synthesis software developed by A*STAR researchers is the first to deliver high-quality singing automatically, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":4485,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-innovation"],"featured_image_urls":{"full":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794-169x300.jpg",169,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"ultp_layout_landscape_large":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"ultp_layout_landscape":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"ultp_layout_portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"ultp_layout_square":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"newspaper-x-single-post":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",276,490,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-big":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",203,360,false],"newspaper-x-recent-post-list-image":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",37,65,false],"web-stories-poster-portrait":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",300,532,false],"web-stories-publisher-logo":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",54,96,false],"web-stories-thumbnail":["https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/2794.jpg",150,266,false]},"author_info":{"info":["Amrita Tuladhar"]},"category_info":"Entertainment<\/a> Innovation<\/a>","tag_info":"Innovation","comment_count":"0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4484\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.revoscience.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}