SynthAssist: An Audio Synthesizer Programmed With Vocal Imitation

Cartwright, M., Pardo, B. SynthAssist: An Audio Synthesizer Programmed With Vocal Imitation. In Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2014. Best Demo Award

Abstract

While programming an audio synthesizer can be difficult, if a user has a general idea of the sound they are trying to program, they may be able to imitate it with their voice. In this technical demonstration, we demonstrate SynthAssist, a system that allows the user to program an audio synthesizer using vocal imitation and interactive feedback. This system treats synthesizer programming as an audio information retrieval task. To account for the limitations of the human voice, it compares vocal imitations to synthesizer sounds by using both absolute and relative temporal shapes of relevant audio features, and it re nes the query and feature weights using relevance feedback.