Task 6

Name: Real-time preventive assessment of the singing voice

Coordination: FEUP/UCP

Duration: 24 months

Task description

The objective of TASK6 is to develop a software environment (an extension of that developed in the context of TASK2) allowing singers to monitor their singing voice in real-time with the purpose to detect risk factors (i.e., stress factors or voice over-use factors) that could develop into voice disorders. The results of TASK 4 and TASK5 will be used to establish a safety margin between normal voice usage and incorrect or risky voice usage.

As in TASK2, it should be noted that a significant challenge that will be tackled in this task is not only to take full advantage of meaningful acoustic features, but to make it possible to extract them from running singing and not only from sustained vowels. This important advance paves the way for remote automatic assessment of the voice quality [Rei04] as it has been already highlighted in the description of TASK5.

This task will require extensive validation work and will involve researchers from FEUP (engineers) and FMUP (ORL doctors).

Expected results

The expected outcomes of this task are 4 reports, one journal paper, one international conference paper, and one prototype.

Human resources: 42.65 person-month.