Assistive Real-Time Technology in Singing

It is a fact that on the transition between the XX and XXI centuries, a period in technological history known as "information age", characterized by the ubiquity of the computer and inspired by the concept of "ambience intelligence"; the pedagogy of singing, the assessment of the quality of singing and the preventive vocal usage are poorly assisted by computers. This project proposal addresses this issue in an ambitious way by gathering together institutions, professionals and researchers from three complementary areas: singing pedagogy, engineering/signal processing, and medical/laryngology. The common purpose is to articulate knowledge and know-how from the different disciplines in order to design, implement and validate innovative technologies and methodologies that are useful to singing students, teachers or professionals, namely:

1. new technology-assisted pedagogic methodologies,
2. real-time visual feedback of relevant quality parameters of the singing voice, and
3. real-time monitoring and assessment of the singing voice with the purpose to prevent voice disorders.

21 February 2014

Room I-105, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal

The meeting involves essentially a set of presentations and demos illustrating some of the results of the project.

More info and program

In order to address these challenges, seven tasks have been planned that include the following specific goals:

• to promote a deep and structured knowledge concerning the voice production system, the correlation between subjective quality parameters of the singing voice (e.g., breathiness, clarity, vibrato, singer's formant) and objective acoustic features (e.g., jitter, shimmer, harmonics to noise ratio, harmonic irregularity and extension, closing/open coefficient of the glottal pulse), the correlation between objective acoustic features and voice disorders in singing,
• the design, realization and validation of biofeedback technologies in singing as well as technology-assisted teaching/learning methodologies,
• the design, realization and optimization of technologies allowing the real-time transcription of singing to musical score and including editing capabilities,
• the robust estimation of the glottal pulse in real-time from running singing and not only from sustained vowels as it is the rule with currently existing technology extracting information concerning the quality of the phonation or concerning the abnormal operation of the vocal folds,
• the design, realization and validation of technologies for the real-time assessment of the singing voice in order to monitor vocal stress, to detect risks of voice over-use and to prevent voice disorders.

Please navigate through this site to learn about the specificity of each task and its results, to access related documentation and to sense the significance, impact and visibility of the outcomes.

While you become familiar with the overall progress of the project, don't hesitate to share with us your suggestions or thoughts. It doesn't need to be in real-time to sound like music to our ears !