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

The HandySinger system is a personified tool developedto naturally express a singing voice controlled by the gestures of a hand puppet. Assuming that a singing voice is akind of musical expression, natural expressions of the singingvoice are important for personification. We adopt a singingvoice morphing algorithm that effectively smoothes out thestrength of expressions delivered with a singing voice. Thesystem's hand puppet consists of a glove with seven bendsensors and two pressure sensors. It sensitively capturesthe user's motion as a personified puppet's gesture. Tosynthesize the different expressional strengths of a singingvoice, 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 asthe target. This configuration provides musically expressedcontrols that are intuitive to users. In the experiment, weevaluate whether 1) the morphing algorithm interpolatesexpressional strength in a perceptual sense, 2) the handpuppet interface provides gesture data at sufficient resolution, and 3) the gestural mapping of the current systemworks as planned.