Computer Science Students Help Singers Learn Their Vowels

March 7, 2014

As part of the final project in Ehsan Hoque's Fall Human-Computer Interaction class, a team of students including Nate Buckley '15, Tait Madsen '15 (former ESM student now in CSC), Cynthia Ryan (MS candidate), Veronika Alex '14 and Josh Bronstein '14 joined with Prof. Katherine Ciesinski and her students from the Eastman School of Music. The team developed a prototype that provides real time feedback as singers produce vowels. The system automatically recognizes the speech formants and maps it into real time easy-to-interpret visuals. Students deployed the system at the Eastman School of Music and demonstrated that singers could produce vowels more effectively using the tool compared to the traditional method. This was done in less than a month as a HCI final project with a team of 4 undergraduates, and 1 graduate student who happens to be a full time employee at Xerox.  We're glad that we were able to include Eastman, Xerox and URCS in one project.  Full article.