Vary P, Martin R (2006) Digital speech transmission, John Wiley & Sons Ltd, West Sussex The method is based upon our previous published work which implemented an analysis-by-synthesis approach to voice reconstruction using a modified CELP codec. This method extracts voice factors which are important to ‘naturalness’ from the whispered signal and applies these to the reconstructed speech. In this paper, a method for pitch contour variation in reconstructed speech is presented. It is the conjecture of the authors that limited pitch variations in the reconstructed speech contributes most to that lack of naturalness. Reconstruction of speech from whispers has been demonstrated previously, however the resulting speech does not exhibit particularly high intelligibility, and more importantly, sounds un-natural.
Such reconstruction is important for both total and partial laryngectomy patients to improve on the monotonous robotized sound typical of electrolarynx devices. "Because you didn't know it was me in the beginning," she said, "and I was so excited.This paper considers regeneration of natural sounding speech from whisper-speech, produced by patients with vocal tract lesions affecting the glottis. 1 single in the USA.Īnd decades later, "I honestly think that the most fun I ever had making a song was 'Believe,'" Cher told Billboard in 2015.įor her, a true queen of pop music reinvention, it's all about the element of surprise. 1 in 17 countries, making her the oldest female performer (at 53) to score a No. And it started with "Believe," which would become the top song of 1999, win Cher a Grammy for best dance recording and hit No. Hildebrand couldn't have predicted the influence of "Believe" and its pioneering use of Auto-Tune, not as a cosmetic clean-up tool but as its own distinct stylistic effect. More: How Cher became an icon for a new generation, from 'Mamma Mia' to her beloved Twitter
“I didn’t think anybody in their right mind would ever use that (effect),” Hildebrand said. Yet Taylor unlocked Auto-Tune's potential for drastically distorting vocals for stylistic effect, which shocked the creator of Auto-Tune, Andy Hildebrand, an electrical engineer who cited "Believe" as a turning point in a 2017 interview. What Auto-Tune wasn't intended for, though, is making its singers sound like robots. Once Cher suggested manipulating her vocals, Taylor began tinkering with the song on Auto-Tune, a recording program that had been on the market for just a year, intended – and still widely used today – to help producers make infinitesimal pitch corrections to recorded music. She wanted to make a dance-floor-friendly single that appealed to her gay fan base after the disappointing sales of her 1995 album "It's a Man's World." The Auto-Tuned vocals in "Believe" almost didn't make the track's final cut, Cher told The New York Times in a 1999 interview. Without "Believe," the first song to introduce Auto-Tune to the mainstream, who knows if, or how, the then-fledgling vocal effects program would've become the mainstay it is today, transforming pop vocals before revolutionizing the past decade of hip-hop.
Yet, that doesn't mean the distinction isn't deserved.
#Robotize vocal software#
Twenty years ago, a pop star on a downswing took a chance on a brand-new piece of recording software to do the unthinkable: taking her voice, her most recognizable asset, and robotizing it almost beyond recognition.Ĭher's "Believe," her megahit that turns 20 on Monday, changed the way modern music is made, an amusing distinction for a song with vocals that bear more than a passing resemblance to Kermit the Frog.