Talking Soundscapes: Automatizing Voice Transformations for Crowd Simulation

Janer J, Gerærts R, van Toll WG, Bonada J. Talking Soundscapes: Automatizing Voice Transformations for Crowd Simulation. In: AES Conference: 49th International Conference: Audio for Games. Audio Engineering Society; 2013. Paper 1-1. Available from: https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=16650

@inproceedings{Janer2013_16650,
  author = {Janer, Jordi and Gerærts, Roland and van Toll, Wouter G. and Bonada, Jordi},
  title = {{Talking Soundscapes: Automatizing Voice Transformations for Crowd Simulation}},
  booktitle = {AES Conference: 49th International Conference: Audio for Games},
  note = {Paper 1-1},
  year = {2013},
  month = feb,
  publisher = {Audio Engineering Society},
  url = {https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=16650}
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - Talking Soundscapes: Automatizing Voice Transformations for Crowd Simulation
AU  - Janer, Jordi
AU  - Gerærts, Roland
AU  - van Toll, Wouter G.
AU  - Bonada, Jordi
T2  - AES Conference: 49th International Conference: Audio for Games
M1  - Paper 1-1
PY  - 2013
DA  - 2013/02/06
UR  - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=16650
PB  - Audio Engineering Society
LA  - en
AB  - The addition of a crowd in a virtual environment, such as a game world, can make the environment more realistic. While researchers focused on the visual modeling and simulation of a crowd, its sound production has received less attention. We propose the generation of the sound of a crowd by retrieving a very small set of speech snippets from a user-contributed database, and transforming and layering voice recordings according to the character localization in the crowd simulation. Our proof-of-concept integrates state-of-the-art audio processing and crowd simulation algorithms. The novelty resides in exploring how we can create a flexible crowd sound from a reduced number of samples, whose acoustic characteristics (such as people density and dialogue activity) could be modeled in practice by means of pitch, timbre and time-scaling transformations.
ER  -