Voice Classification System

Fajiculay, Vanessa F. Onrubia, Carmela C. BSCS 3-3

Introduction The voice is considered to be the most flexible, rich and powerful of all instruments and it has always been an inexorable source of inspiration for musicians, sound designers and audio programmers (Bonada and Loscos, 2003). Recent works have been conducted to find the best features to describe singing voice. Other works have been addressing more specific music style contents, or have been interested in the accompanied singing voice detection (Mesaros and Virtanen, 2010). With the tremendous growth of digital music on computers, personal electronics and the Internet, music information retrieval has become a rapidly emerging research field.(Chai and Vercoe,2005). Singing voice is the main focus of attention in musical pieces with a vocal part; most people use the singers voice as the primary cue for identifying a song. Also, a natural classification of music, besides genre, is the artist name (often equivalent to singers name) (Chagnon, 1998).Finding your vocal range and correct key is an important part of becoming a singer. One of the biggest complaints from our instrument playing associates is that popular singers rarely know in which key their music is to be performed (Baker, 2001).

Voice classification is a frequent preoccupation of young singers searching for repertoire. Often, singers are sent to a laryngologist in the hope that the anatomy of their vocal folds and throat will help in their voice classification. The prevailing misconception among novices is that vocal fold length determines voice type. However, classification must also take into account voice quality and pitch (perceived frequency)
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range, and not just the fundamental frequency produced by the vibrating vocal folds (Franoise, 1998).

Background of the Study Specific voice detection in music is not a widely studied subject, but most of its ideas come from speech recognition topics which are a well established research area (Khine, New, Li, 2008). Detecting distinct features in modern pop music is an important problem that can have significant applications in areas such as multimedia entertainment. They can be used, for example, to give a visually coherent representation of the sound. We propose to integrate a singing voice detector with a multimedia, multi-touch game where the user has to perform simple tasks at certain key points in the music (Nwe, Shenoy, Wang, 2004). It is never wise to make a quick classification of any given singing voice. (Sometimes singers are in a hurry to label voices because they want to understand their voices better or because they are anxious to begin singing suitable repertoire.) The development of good vocal habits is essential to correct classification, and if a singer is lacking in certain critical technical abilities, it may be easy to incorrectly categorize that voice. Singers should take the time to gain solid technical skills within a limited and comfortable range of pitches before attempting to push the voice to its extremes if its either high or low (O'Connor, 2010). Once the basics of good technique have become established in this comfortable area, the true quality of the voice will emerge, and the upper and lower limits of the

range can then be explored safely (O'Connor, 2010). Thats what are study are going to do, to help the singers or non singers to identify what type of voices they have. To help them develop their technical skills and improve it more.

Bibliography:

Bonada,J. and Loscos, A.(2003) , Sample-based Singing Voice Synthesizer by Spectral Concatenation, pp.1-4 Music Technology Group, Audiovisual Institute, Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona, Spain Retrieved November 27,2010, from http://mtg.upf.edu/files/publications/SMAC2003-aloscos.pdf. Chagnon, Franoise (1998), Classifying Singing Voices, pp.1, La Scena Musicale, Retrieved December 04, 2010, from http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm4-1/sm41VoiceDoc_en.htm. Chai, W. and Vercoe, B. (2005), Music Classification with Partial Selection Based on Confidence Measures, pp.1-6 Media Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Retrieved November 23, 2010, from http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~chaiwei/papers/chai_icml2005_final.pdf. Khine, S.Z.K., New, Tin Lay and Li, Haizhou (2008), Singing voice detection in pop songs using co-training algorithm,: Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2008. ICASSP 2008. IEEE International Conference, Retrieved December 11, 2010, from http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4517938. Mesaros, A. and Virtanen, T. (2010), Adaptation of a Speech Recognizer for Singing Voice, pp.1-5 Department of Signal Processing, Tampere University of Technology Korkeakoulunkatu 1,33720, Tampere, Finland, Retrieved November 29, 2010 from http://www.cs.tut.fi/~mesaros/pubs/sp_adapt.pdf. Nwe, Tin Lay, Shenoy, Arun, Wang, Ye (2004), Detecting key features in popular music: case study singing voice detection, Department of Computer Science, School of Computing National University of Singapore, pp.1-2, Retrieved October 10-16, 2004, from http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~wangye/papers/Singing%20Voice%20Detection%2 0in%20Popular%20Music.pdf. O'Connor, Karyn (2010), How to Determine Singing Range and Vocal Fach (Voice Type), pp. 1, Retrieved Feb 25, 2010, from http://singwise.com/cgibin/main.pl?section=articles&doc=DeterminingVocalFach.

Theoretical Framework of the System:

Voice tone
H1

H2

Sound Pressure

Voice Classification System

H3

H5

Voice Frequency
H4

Voice Types

Pitch

H1: The better the voice tone quality produce, the easier for the system to classify what voice type is. H2: The higher the sound pressure is, the harder for the system to classify the voice produce. H3: The more the voice types are, the harder for the system to classify the voice type will be. H4: The better the contraction of pitch is, the easier for the system to classify what voice type will be. H5: The lower the frequency is, the lower the pitch will be produce and the easier for the system to classify the voice type with a low notes. The higher the frequency is, the higher the pitch will be produce and the easier for the system to classify the voice type with high notes.

Theoretical Framework of the system for the User:

System Interface Microphone Receiver

H1 H4 H3

User Operating System

H2

Suggested Songs

H1: The better the quality of the microphone receiver is, the more accurate the output will be and the more exciting for the user to use the system. H2: The more applicable the suggested songs for the voice of the user are, the higher the chance for the user to sing on the right tune. H3: The higher the resolution of the operating system is, the better the system interface will be. H4: The better the system interface is, the more exciting for the user to use the system.

Statement of the Problem: The aim of this research is to develop a system that enriches a relationship between humans and music, through singing voice classification and proper tune of singing. Do users sing better as a result of this system? What is the technology to be used? What is the difference of this system to the other system? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the system compared with other systems? How do the users use the system? How does the system affect the singing ability of the user? What do we mean by voice classification system?