Real Voices in Virtual Spaces Seminar

Everyone’s voice is as unique to them as their fingerprint, and yet has the potential to create a huge variety of sounds associated with different intentions and meaning: Beyond the spoken word a voice conveys important information including emotions, health and age as well as creating artistic and aesthetic outputs. When singing, the added complexities of vocal production, musical style, context and perception can alter numerous acoustic characteristics, which in turn change the perception of that voice for both the singer and the listener.  Focussing on the singing voice, this talk will discuss the importance of environmental context for building a complete understanding of the voice signal, and consider how immersive technologies are allowing a new phase of voice research concerning how voices behave in different acoustic spaces. The implementation of the VIIVA system (Vocal Interaction in an Immersive Virtual Acoustic) will be introduced, which is a virtual reality system allowing the user to sing as part of a virtual choir, hearing themselves in the performance venue of the other singers. Different uses of the VIIVA system for research in the context of voice science and acoustics will be explored alongside its potential application across different application areas across society.