the application of real-time pitch shifting

These days there are many artists that are using real-time pitch shifting during their performance. In the metal genre for example, artists use pitch shifting to lower the pitch of the vocals, which makes them sound more rough. On the other side some artists like Chuck Berry used pitch shifting to make their voice sound younger.

 

One might think now that pitch shifting can only be used by singers, so they can raise or lower their voice to sound more feminine, masculine, younger, older,…. But it can also be used by other people to. For example by voice actors, radio presenters and by people with a hearing loss in the high frequency sounds.

 

Formerly, when a very high voice was needed for a character (an animal for example) in a cartoon or animation film, they first had to record the desired speech signal at a low speed. afterwards they could playback the signal at the normal speed so that a high voice was obtained for that specific character. Obviously this takes a lot of time which is undesired when making a cartoon. Therefore it would be advantageous to do this pitch shift real-time. Voice actors could now just speak into the microphone while their voice is being raised or lowered real-time. This allows for a more intuitive manner of voice acting while speeding up the process significantly.

 

Since a radio presenters voice has to be pleasant to listen to, real-time pitch shifting could allow more people to do this job since it can easily modify a person’s voice, making his or her voice sound optimal before broadcasting.

 

Also for people with a hearing loss in the high frequency sounds, it would be advantageous to lower the pitch of the speaker in real-time, so that these people are able to understand conversations better.