HandySinger: Expressive Singing Voice Morphing using Personified Hand-puppet Interface

The HandySinger system is a personified tool developed to naturally express a singing voice controlled by the gestures of a hand puppet. Assuming that a singing voice is a kind of musical expression, natural expressions of the singing voice are important for personification. We adopt a singing voice morphing algorithm that effectively smoothes out the strength of expressions delivered with a singing voice. The system’s hand puppet consists of a glove with seven bend sensors and two pressure sensors. It sensitively captures the user’s motion as a personified puppet’s gesture. To synthesize the different expressional strengths of a singing voice, the “normal” (without expression) voice of a particular singer is used as the base of morphing, and three different expressions, “dark,” “whisper” and “wet,” are used as the target. This configuration provides musically expressed controls that are intuitive to users. In the experiment, we evaluate whether 1) the morphing algorithm interpolates expressional strength in a perceptual sense, 2) the handpuppet interface provides gesture data at sufficient resolution, and 3) the gestural mapping of the current system works as planned.