STRAIGHTMORPH: A Voice Morphing Tool for Research in Voice Communication Sciences

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to make easily available to the scientific community an efficient voice morphing tool called STRAIGHTMORPH and provide a short tutorial on its use with examples. STRAIGHTMORPH consists of a set of Matlab functions allowing to generate high-quality, parametrically-controlled morphs of an arbitrary number of voice samples. A first step consists in extracting an ‘mObject’ for each voice sample, with accurate tracking of the fundamental frequency contour and manual definition of Time and Frequency anchors corresponding across samples to be morphed. The second step consists in parametrically combining the mObjects to generate novel synthetic stimuli, such as gender, identity or emotion continua, or random combinations. Although STRAIGHTMORPH has been designed for human voices it can work well with other types of sounds such as non-human primate vocalizations.