journal article·2016-11-19Open access

Spectral Envelope Transformation in Singing Voice for Advanced Pitch Shifting

José Santacruz, Lorenzo Tardón, Isabel Barbancho, Ana Barbancho

Applied Sciences· Volume 6· Issue 11

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to perform a step towards more natural pitch shifting techniques in singing voice for its application in music production and entertainment systems. In this paper, we present an advanced method to achieve natural modifications when applying a pitch shifting process to singing voice by modifying the spectral envelope of the audio excerpt. To this end, an all-pole model has been selected to model the spectral envelope, which is estimated using a constrained non-linear optimization. The analysis of the global variations of the spectral envelope was carried out by identifying changes of the parameters of the model along with the changes of the pitch. With the obtained spectral envelope transformation functions, we applied our pitch shifting scheme to some sustained vowels in order to compare results with the same transformation made by using the Flex Pitch plugin of Logic Pro X and pitch synchronous overlap and add technique (PSOLA). This comparison has been carried out by means of both an objective and a subjective evaluation. The latter was done with a survey open to volunteers on our website.
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Research context

OpenAlex topics: Music and Audio Processing · Speech and Audio Processing · Music Technology and Sound Studies

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Affiliations

ATIC Research Group, Dept. Ingeniería de Comunicaciones, E.T.S.I. Telecomunicación, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, Campus de Teatinos s/n, Málaga 29071, Spain

Funding

Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of the Spanish Government · Universidad de Malaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional (CEI) Andalucia TECH

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