A proposal of vibrato feature to reflect magnitude of fluctuation of fundamental frequency for evaluation similarity in singing voice

In this paper, we propose a new vibrato feature in order to measure temporal characteristics of vibrato in singing voice. The data to evaluate the vibrato feature includes non-imitative singing voice and imitative singing voice of target singer, whose voice and singing style have strong individuality. The data also includes the target singer's voice extracted from CD. The proposed vibrato feature has an advantage that the feature properly reflects the magnitude of fluctuations of fundamental frequency. The experimental results indicated that fluctuations of fundamental frequency of the imitative singing are larger than those of the non-imitative singing, and the magnitude of the proposed vibrato feature of the imitative singing is close to that of CD. We also performed objective evaluation by using the database that measures a distance between features calculated from imitative voice or non-imitative voice and CD's voice. The evaluation showed that the proposed vibrato feature correctly indicates smaller distance between the imitative voice and the CD's voice. © 2017 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.