Dan Stowell

Contact Details

Title: Research Student
Tel: National: 020 7882 7986
International: +44 20 7882 7986
Fax: National: 020 7882 7997
International: +44 20 7882 7997
Email: dan.stowell@elec.qmul.ac.uk
Room: Eng 109

Research Group: Centre for Digital Music

Supervisor: Mark Plumbley

Research Topic: Real-Time Analysis of Voice for Musical Applications

The human voice is a wonderfully, perhaps uniquely, expressive instrument. Its performance can involve a bewildering amount of expressive variations beyond those of pitch and loudness, including trill, effort level, breathiness, creakiness, growl, twang. Many popular singers exploit these features explicitly for musical expression, and most people are able to use their voice expressively -- in speech even if not necessarily in a trained musical manner. This suggests that using the voice as part of an interface for musical expression (rather than, say, the hands) has the potential to offer a level of expression that can be intuitive and fulfilling for the performer, if we can analyse/parametrise vocal expression in a suitable manner.

This is therefore the motivation for the current project: to enable the real-time analysis of voice, in order to facilitate musical expression by using the analysed voice as a controller for musical systems.

An interface for musical performance should satisfy various criteria, including:

• Sufficient flexibility to offer a full range of expression. As with acoustic instruments, this might not be immediately available to the unpractised -- e.g. those who have never touched a drum-kit may have difficulty using it to subtle effect. However, it should be possible for an experienced user to produce a wide range of musical expression; we may say that the interface should provide a sufficient number of "degrees of freedom". This implies that the system must be "learnable".
• A degree of correspondence between the performer's physical expression and the musical result. For example, using greater physical force with many acoustic instruments results in a louder sound. This correspondence allows the performer to connect his or her emotional expression with the musical output in an intuitive way.

Publications

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2009 and forthcoming

D. Stowell and M. D. Plumbley, Fast multidimensional entropy estimation by k-d partitioning, IEEE Signal Processing Letters 16 (6), 537–540, June 2009. DOI:10.1109/LSP.2009.2017346

D. Stowell, A. Robertson, M. D. Plumbley, and N. Bryan-Kinns, Evaluation of live human-computer music-making: quantitative and qualitative approaches, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 67 (11), 960-975, November 2009. DOI:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2009.05.007

D. Stowell, Writing Unit Generator Plugins, in Wilson, Cottle and Collins (eds.) The SuperCollider Book. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. In press. [SuperCollider website]

2008

D. Stowell and M. D. Plumbley, Robustness and independence of voice timbre features under live performance acoustic degradations. 11th Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFx '08).

D. Stowell, M. D. Plumbley, and N. Bryan-Kinns, Discourse analysis evaluation method for expressive musical interfaces. New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME'08)
[Accompanying data file]

D. Stowell and M. D. Plumbley, Characteristics of the beatboxing vocal style, Tech. Rep. C4DM-TR-08-01, Dept. of Electronic Engineering, Queen Mary, University of London, 2008.

2007

D. Stowell and M. D. Plumbley. Adaptive whitening for improved real-time audio onset detection. In: Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC'07), Copenhagen, Denmark, pp 312-319, August 2007.
[SuperCollider plugin]

D. Stowell and M. D. Plumbley. Pitch-aware real-time timbral re-mapping. In Proceedings of the Digital Music Research Network Summer Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, 7-8 July 2007.

D. Stowell. 8-bit larynx. Musical work, NetVoTech concert of live voice and technology, July 2007.
[View video online via archive.org or youtube]

2006

D. Stowell. Genetic Algorithms and live evolution. SuperCollider symposium, Birmingham, July 2006.
[Download: RTF]