The HandySinger system is a personified tool developed to express naturally a singing voice controlled by the gestures of a hand puppet.
The system’s hand puppet consists of a glove with seven bend sensors and two pressure sensors. It sensitively captures the user’s motion as a personified puppet’s gesture. To synthesize the different expressional strengths of a singing voice, the normal (without expression) voice of a particular singer is used as the base of morphing, and three different expressions—“dark”, “whisper”, and “wet”—are used as the target.
This configuration provides musically expressed controls that are intuitive to users. The experiment evaluates whether (1) the morphing algorithm interpolates expressional strength in a perceptual sense, (2) the hand-puppet interface provides gesture data at sufficient resolution, and (3) the gestural mapping of the current system works as planned.
This according to “HandySinger: Expressive singing voice morphing using personified hand-puppet interface” by Tomoko Yonezawa, Noriko Suzuki, Kenji Mase, and Kiyoshi Kogure, an essay included in NIME-05: New interfaces for musical expression (Vancouver : University of British Columbia Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre, 2005).
Below, a perhaps unrelated HandySinger.
