Hideki Kawahara on STRAIGHT (high resolution speech modifications)
Prof. Kawahara has spent many years building STRAIGHT, an ultra-high resolution approach to analyzing and modifying speech signals, that is the basis of many speech manipulation experiments and products. He will be at CCRMA to discuss STRAIGHT, its history, its approach, and current status.
This talk presents underlying concept, technologies and applications of STRAIGHT, a framework for speech analysis, modification and resynthesis, which was originally designed to facilitate speech perception research. The talk also introduces recent advances which may provide new possible strategies in speech communication research. One is "Temporally variable multi-aspect morphing of arbitrarily many voices." The other is "SparkNG: Speech Production and Auditory perception Research Kernel the Next Generation." Speech plays essential roles in human communication by providing rich side information channels which modify/expand linguistic contents. While recent resurgence of machine learning technologies made speech-based communication with smart machines practical and popular, these rich side information channels which make speech unique are not well explored. It is crucially important to make smart machines to share common basis with humans of these rich side information channels based on deep understanding of human speech communication. "Making speech tangible" by introducing tools which enable quantitative and precise as well as intuitive/direct manipulation of speech parameters, I hope, leads to better understanding of human speech communication.
I will use many demonstrations with visualization/auralization including live Matlab demonstrations. How do you find the following title and abstract. I am happy to be flexibly adjust contents of my talk based on your suggestions.