Is This Guitar Talking or What !?

In this project, we explore the possibility for an augmented guitar to be used as a controller for the expressive manipulation of reactive synthetic speech. This idea comes at the intersection of two research frameworks. On the one hand, we aim at augmenting the electric guitar by extracting guitar playing techniques directly from the guitar sound, through an hexaphonic pickup (one micro- phone per string). On the other hand, we develop the MAGE software, a unique set of tools for generating high-quality HMM-based speech synthesis in a reactive way. Bringing these two technologies together allows us to explore various mappings between the controller and the speech synthesis, and propose expressive solutions.