how to convert male voice to natural female

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Hello everybody

The google, youtube search has not helped me and I did not find any thread about this here.

I want to convert my male voice records to a natural female version.

For the "lower deeper male monster" I used Adobe Audition with the pitch effect. That worked well.

Problem:
When I use Adobe Audition to make the female "elf" or "fairy" it sounds very unnatural and still rather male. When I increase pitch it sounds more female but more unnatural.

The free tools and cheap commercial one's don't seem to make a lot of difference to Adobe Audition's features.

Questions:
1. Is it possible to make a male voice record sound like a woman's and what tools are there if one wants to make it sound as natural as possible?

2. What are the best tools for voice morphing besides IrcamTools Trax?

3. If someone knows how to do it, could he or she post a "before" "after" sample to get me a good benchmark?

Thanks for reading and your help,
Matt

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It's a tough thing to do, because as I am certain you know, shifting all the fequencies together at once (pitch shifting) isn't what makes a natural female voice, you have to use a more selective method shifting certain harmonics to get even relatively close - frequently called pitch preserve.
I know Kerovee (free autotune VST) can KIND OF not really... do this, but the end result actually sounds more robotic than natural human frequencies.

I remember a long time ago I use to have a voice masking software (not a plugin, it was a standalone executable) that had a pretty convincing female voice as one of the options. I don't remember what it was called...god that was years ago....
It was a commercial software, and if I recall, fairly expensive for a simple voice masker without many other bells and whistles, but most of the voices it could emulate were...well not great, but I would say acceptable.

Sorry that isn't much help, but try searching for "female voice masker" and maybe something will come up. The main point I am trying to make though is that I don't think you will have a lot of luck for free or cheap softwares, as the ability to properly and naturally voice mask a male voice to a female is just too damn difficult.

EDIT:
also female voices have a different resonance. Learning the difference between male and female vocal chords may help you understand this.

One more edit:
Speaking in a falsetto may naturally get your resonance closer to a womans - a young womans, that is, so give that a try.

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You'll need to adjust the formants.

Celemony Melodyne.
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ntom wrote: I know Kerovee (free autotune VST) can KIND OF not really... do this, but the end result actually sounds more robotic than natural human frequencies.
This. It does a great job.

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Aloysius wrote:You'll need to adjust the formants.

Celemony Melodyne.
This. Formant shifting, and slight pitch shifting. But it also has a lot to do with the original performance.
Incomplete list of my gear: 1/8" audio input jack.

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Antares Throat.
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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If you´re using Cubase (v5 and above) then you already have "pitch correct", which lets you adjust formants and pitch. Try to play with both parameters plus the key that you´re singing in (you may sound more "womanish" in higher keys than lower ones), and you´ll end up with something good.

Sorry, it´s called "pitch right"!

Best Regards

Roman Empire

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working at a higher sample rate may be beneficial with some processes, depends.
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You know, I've worked with a lot of different voice programs out there, both hardware and software. There really is nothing that is going to give you what you want. You can either try something like Realivox Blue, where you play the melody with a keyboard and you can add words and it sounds very good. but your voice to sound like a woman, none of these programs will do a good job.

Honestly, the easiest thing you could do, especially in these days of fast internet and a global market, is hire a woman to sing on your track. That's really going to give you the realistic sound.

Another thing you can do is sing the tracks in a higher key, then try to process it that way. The higher the voice, the less fake it's going to sound. So what you do, you take your existing track, transpose them up to the highest key you could possibly sing, and then, take that vocal tracksand further transpose it with celemony or something to match the key of the original track. That's going to give you the most realistic under the conditions you mention. But the best thing, just hire a female to sing. Problem solved.

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No existing tools can convert a typical male voice to a believable female voice. Not saying it will never be done, but nothing on the market today can do it.

Speech synthesis is the closest you'll come. If you're talking spoken word (non-musical speech), you probably already know that there are voices that sound pretty good but are still pretty unmistakably TTS.

Vocaloid is a fair amount more realistic sounding, depending on the voice, but it's for singing, not talking. (Not sure what you needed the tech for, OP.)

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Far from perfect, I use Logic Vocal Transformer and play with the formant knob, but you'll never get a real result.
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UltimateOutsider wrote:No existing tools can convert a typical male voice to a believable female voice. Not saying it will never be done, but nothing on the market today can do it.
The IRCAM software which did these (for feature films)

http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/analy ... index.html

Is available 'on the market'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2XZne0s-0
Speech synthesis is the closest you'll come. If you're talking spoken word (non-musical speech), you probably already know that there are voices that sound pretty good but are still pretty unmistakably TTS.

Vocaloid is a fair amount more realistic sounding, depending on the voice, but it's for singing, not talking. (Not sure what you needed the tech for, OP.)
Vocaloid certainly isnt more realistic than the IRCAM stuff above.
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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whyterabbyt wrote:The IRCAM software which did these (for feature films)

http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/analy ... index.html

Is available 'on the market'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2XZne0s-0
Haha, while I hadn't heard of that thing before, I can pretty safely conclude that you and I have very different understandings of what the words "believable female voice" mean. :)

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UltimateOutsider wrote:
whyterabbyt wrote:The IRCAM software which did these (for feature films)

http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/analy ... index.html

Is available 'on the market'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2XZne0s-0
Haha, while I hadn't heard of that thing before, I can pretty safely conclude that you and I have very different understandings of what the words "believable female voice" mean. :)
I already got that from your comments on Vocaloid supposedly being realistic, yes. The fact remains that the first set of examples were deemed 'believable' enough for film, and this software been being used for that purpose for several years now.
my other modular synth is a bugbrand

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whyterabbyt wrote:I already got that from your comments on Vocaloid supposedly being realistic, yes. The fact remains that the first set of examples were deemed 'believable' enough for film, and this software been being used for that purpose for several years now.
Well, Birdemic is a feature film, so forgive me if that credential doesn't impress. And any film with a budget higher than Birdemic's can employ actual women for speaking parts.

If you think the Ircam thing sounds like a real woman, well... you might need to meet more women.

There are many reasons why a properly-programmed Vocaloid can pass better than the real-time speech processors or TTS can, not the least of which is the fact that it employs actual speech samples of actual females (or males, depending on the voice package). But you're the guy who recommended Antares Throat a few posts back, so I see no point in defending it further. ;)

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