SynthAssist: Querying an Audio Synthesizer by Vocal Imitation

Mark Cartwright, and Bryan Pardo

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract:

Programming an audio synthesizer can be a difficult task for many. However, 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. This paper presents SynthAssist, a system for interactively searching the synthesis space of an audio synthesizer. In this work, we present how to use the system for querying a database of audio synthesizer patches (i.e. settings/parameters) by vocal imitation and user feedback. To account for the limitations of the human voice, it uses both absolute and relative time series representations of features and relevance feedback on both the feature weights and time series to refine the query. The method presented in this paper can be used to search through large databases of previously existing ``factory presets'' or program a synthesizer using the data-driven approach to automatic synthesizer programming.

Citation:

Mark Cartwright, and Bryan Pardo. 2014. SynthAssist: Querying an Audio Synthesizer by Vocal Imitation. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1178730

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{mcartwright2014,
 abstract = {Programming an audio synthesizer can be a difficult task for many. However, 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. This paper presents SynthAssist, a system for interactively searching the synthesis space of an audio synthesizer. In this work, we present how to use the system for querying a database of audio synthesizer patches (i.e. settings/parameters) by vocal imitation and user feedback. To account for the limitations of the human voice, it uses both absolute and relative time series representations of features and relevance feedback on both the feature weights and time series to refine the query. The method presented in this paper can be used to search through large databases of previously existing ``factory presets'' or program a synthesizer using the data-driven approach to automatic synthesizer programming.},
 address = {London, United Kingdom},
 author = {Mark Cartwright and Bryan Pardo},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.5281/zenodo.1178730},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 pages = {363--366},
 publisher = {Goldsmiths, University of London},
 title = {SynthAssist: Querying an Audio Synthesizer by Vocal Imitation},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2014/nime2014_446.pdf},
 year = {2014}
}