The concatenative real-time sound synthesis system CataRT plays grains from a large corpus of segmented and descriptor-analysed sounds according to proximity to a target position in the descriptor space. This can be seen as a content-based extension to granular synthesis providing direct access to specific sound characteristics. CataRT is implemented in Max/MSP using the FTM library and an SQL database. Segmentation and MPEG-7 descriptors are loaded from SDIF files or generated on-the-fly. CataRT allows to explore the corpus interactively or via a target sequencer, to resynthesise an audio file or live input with the source sounds, or to experiment with expressive speech synthesis and gestural control.

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IRCAM has a long experience in analysis, synthesis and transformation of voice. Natural voice transformations are of great interest for many applications and can be combine with text-to-speech system, leading to a powerful creation tool. We present research conducted at IRCAM on voice transformations for the last few years. Transformations can be achieved in a global way by modifying pitch, spectral envelope, durations etc. While it sacrifices the possibility to attain a specific target voice, the approach allows the production of new voices of a high degree of naturalness with different gender and age, modified vocal quality, or another speech style. These transformations can be applied in realtime using ircamTools TR A X.Transformation can also be done in a more specific way in order to transform a voice towards the voice of a target speaker. Finally, we present some recent research on the transformation of expressivity.

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