Borrowed Voices

Christophe D'Alessandro, Xiao Xiao, Grégoire Locqueville, and Boris Doval

Music Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

• Year: 2019
• Location: Porto Alegre, Brazil
• Pages: 11–14
• PDF link

Abstract:

Borrowed voices is a performance featuring performative voice synthesis, with two types of instruments: C-Voks and T-Voks. The voices are played a cappella in a double choir of natural and synthetic voices. Performative singing synthesis is a new paradigm in the already long history of artificial voices. The singing voice is played like an instrument, allowing singing with the borrowed voice of another. The relationship of embodiment between the singer's gestures and the vocal sound produced is broken. A voice is singing, with realism, expressivity and musicality, but it is not the musician's own voice, and a vocal apparatus does not control it. The project focuses on control gestures: the music explores vocal sounds produced by the vocal apparatus (the basic sound material), and “played” by the natural voice, by free-hand Theremin-controlled gestures, and by writing gestures on a graphic tablet. The same (types of) sounds but different gestures give different musical “instruments” and expressive possibilities. Another interesting aspect is the distance between synthetic voices and the player, the voice being at the same time embodied (by the player gestures playing the instrument with her/his body) and externalized (because the instrument is not her/his own voice): two different voices sung/played by the same person.

Citation:

BibTeX Entry:

  @inproceedings{nime19-music-DAlessandro,
 abstract = {Borrowed voices is a performance featuring performative voice synthesis, with two types of instruments: C-Voks and T-Voks. The voices are played a cappella in a double choir of natural and synthetic voices. Performative singing synthesis is a new paradigm in the already long history of artificial voices. The singing voice is played like an instrument, allowing singing with the borrowed voice of another. The relationship of embodiment between the singer's gestures and the vocal sound produced is broken. A voice is singing, with realism, expressivity and musicality, but it is not the musician's own voice, and a vocal apparatus does not control it. The project focuses on control gestures: the music explores vocal sounds produced by the vocal apparatus (the basic sound material), and “played” by the natural voice, by free-hand Theremin-controlled gestures, and by writing gestures on a graphic tablet. The same (types of) sounds but different gestures give different musical “instruments” and expressive possibilities. Another interesting aspect is the distance between synthetic voices and the player, the voice being at the same time embodied (by the player gestures playing the instrument with her/his body) and externalized (because the instrument is not her/his own voice): two different voices sung/played by the same person.},
 address = {Porto Alegre, Brazil},
 author = {Christophe D'Alessandro and Xiao Xiao and Grégoire Locqueville and Boris Doval},
 booktitle = {Music Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 editor = {Federico Visi},
 month = {June},
 pages = {11--14},
 publisher = {UFRGS},
 title = {Borrowed Voices},
 url = {http://www.nime.org/proceedings/2019/nime2019_music001.pdf},
 year = {2019}
}