The Cantor Digitalis: A Digital Musical Instrument of the Singing Voice
- Submitting institution
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University of Greenwich
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- UoA32-MCO-LF
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- A multicomponent output
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- The Cantor Digitalis is being submitted with double weighting because it has involved a comprehensive multi-layered work over years, crossing various disciplines and types of outputs: digital musical instrument design (coding the sound synthesis engine and its mapping with a gestural interface); musical performances in international venues with the ensemble Chorus Digitalis; open-source diffusion (software engineering, documentation, collaboration with private sector); scientific evaluation in peer-reviewed journals in the field of musical signal processing and human-computer interaction; use of the instrument in teaching at university and for general- public; and a continuous feedback between these different outputs.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This output is about the design, evaluation and demonstration of the Cantor Digitalis, a digital musical instrument of the singing voice, which has been the main focus of my past work. This multidisciplinary work lies at the frontier of computer science, digital musical instrument design, and voice acoustics. Its significance was proved in a real musical context and in future health applications. I co-created the Chorus Digitalis, a science-music ensemble of Cantor Digitalis players who perform worldwide. We won 1st prize in the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, a world-known international competition about new instruments at Georgia Tech College of Design. The instrument received broad international media coverage. As open-source software, the synthesizer engine is used with commercial Roli Seaboard or other state-of-the-art musical interfaces, and as a real-time sound-source for patients with laryngeal disorders who cannot produce normal voice but who can still whisper. The originality of the work lies in the creation of a singing synthesizer that is controllable through hand gestures in real time, i.e. a series of vocal parameters (pitch, articulation, vocal effort, etc.) are continuously controlled by 3D movements of the hand instead of being controlled by internal-organ gestures (tongue, lip, jaw, etc.) as in natural voice. All the gesture variations, including the small muscular perturbations, are transmitted to the voice synthesizer, a mathematical model of the voice. It allows an infinite number of voices to be created by changing the model parameters. The rigour of the work has been proved by peer-reviewed-journal publications. First, the hand-gesture control interface was evaluated under the methodology of the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction by measuring how accurately the pitch can be controlled compared to natural voice. Then, the synthesizer and its mapping to the gesture interface were described and published both as open-source software and in an engineering journal.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
