Tuesday 1 July 2008

VocaListener

Yesterday and today I had the pleasure to spend some time with Masataka Goto talking about how MIR technologies are changing how we create and enjoy music, and in particular what Masataka calls active music listening. It was also great to get some updates on what's happing on the other end of the world.

One thing I found particularly interesting is the VocaListener project which Tomoyasu Nakano (who recently finished his PhD) and Masataka Goto are working on. VocaListener is based on Vocaloid 2 and synthesizes a singing voice that is very hard to discriminate from a real singer.

Here is a video featuring the synthesized voice using Vocaloid 2 (and special techniques to tune the parameters).



VocaListener received a lot of coverage in Japan and some of it has been translated to English, for example: here, here, and here.

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