Articles and press releases bringing you up to date with the latest news concerning the Institute (new initiatives, publications and additions to the website).

Lise Régnier PhD Defense

Posted: February 16, 2012

"Localization, Characterization and Recognition of Singing Voices". Thursday, March 8, 2pm.

Lise Régnier will defend her doctoral thesis carried out at IRCAM with the Sound Analysis and Synthesis team titled "Localization, Characterization and Recognition of Singing Voices".

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the problem of describing the singing voice within the signal of a song.

The research presented in this thesis concentrates on the three major problems of music information retrieval: the localization of the source to be described (i.e. the recognition of the elements corresponding to the singing voice within the signal of a mixture of instruments), the search of pertinent features to describe the characteristics of the singing voice, and finally the development of pattern recognition methods based on these features to identify singers.

The work presented in this document describes the singing voice with two types of features: the features of timbre, derived from the spectral envelope, and the features of intonation, based on the temporal variations of the fundamental frequency of the sung melody. The features of timbre aim to describe the instrument of the singer (i.e. its vocal tract) while the features of intonation, which describe some expressive attributes of the singing voice such as the vibrato/tremolo and the portamento, aim to describe the style and the technique of the singer. We show, through a series of experiments, that the features of intonation are very accurate to distinguish the singing voice among the other instruments and that these features can be combined with the traditional features of timbre to obtain a better description of the singers' signature and thus enhance the performance of the systems of singer identification.

Jury

Emilia Gomez, Reporter, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona
Sylvain Marchand, Reporter, Bretagne Occidentale University, Brest
Dan Ellis, Examiner, Colombia University, New York City
Olivier Adam, Examiner, Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris
Xavier Rodet, Director, IRCAM, Paris
Geoffroy Peeters, Supervisor, IRCAM, Paris

• Date: Thursday, March 8, 2pm
• Venue: Igor-Stravinsky Room, IRCAM