Realtime Voice Gender Change

This Easter has been very productive for the CLAM framework. Holidays and a bunch of new developers that have aproximated the team during these weeks have accelerated a lot the development which had already been accelerated during last months. As consequence, a lot of dormant to-do's has been addressed and most of them deserve a blog entry (pixmap widgets, realtime LPC/MFCC, Qt3/Fltk drop, Qt4 ports, new visualization widgets, new control widgets...). Just take a look at the CLAM-devel mailing list archives or the development screenshots and you'll see a im not exagerating. So let's start from the beginning.

One of the nicer things I worked on and which is going to be the star on CLAM demos for sure, is the voice Gender Change effect on the NetworkEditor. Since Xavier implemented the offline version, it has been arround for a while on the SMSTools turning Elvis voice into Elvira. It was also on the NetworkEditor but crashing or not even sounding.

So, I am a demo whore, let's make people smile. Let's make it realtime. Pau already did some work as he ported almost all the SMS transformation. I just had to fix some of the internal processings, the Pitch shift, and the SpectralShapeShift. Most of the bugs were about detecting non-harmonic parts and figure out which is the best strategy in those cases. In some case this was detected but the action relied on input to output copies implicit on the offline version but not on the realtime one.

What i was not able to solve is the CombFilter. It added a really extrident noise to the residual part. So I disabled it and it does not sound as perfet but... tada! i started listening my sister voice from the speakers instead of mine when i talked the mic, which is specially frightening, most of you know why.

That's the look the network had after having the system completed.



And a first attemp Prototyper interface for an stand alone application:



As soon as it is available as nightly snapshots try it. It is worth to listen. My first experiments i used it to learn how to do a mixt choir in Ardour with just my own voice.