Formant excursion in singing synthesis

Abstract

This paper presents our work in formant excursion in the human singing voice. In singing voice synthesis, numerous methods have been proposed to modify pitch and energy over time in order to achieve better expressiveness and naturalness [1]-[3]. Methods to modify the spectral envelop, however, remain conservative [4], [5]. An expressive singer, nevertheless, employs different techniques to modify his vocal spectra extensively throughout a song [6]. This motivates our study on formant excursion. We hypothesize that the level of semantic reliance on vowels limits the range of formant excursion and develop a method to find |Ξ|, a measure of isolated spectral distortion attributed to singing expressiveness, independent of the spectral differences inherent between speech and singing. With this, we are able to better parameterize spectral modifications in the singing voice towards a dynamic spectral model for singing synthesis.