Postdoctoral position at LIMSI, France
Expressive Vocal Signal Analysis and Modelling

Content
During the post-production of a movie, as well as for video games, digital double rendering techniques are used to modify the actor’s performance without the need of playing the scene again. This project is aim toward characterising and reproducing the actor’s vocal personality. By creating a digital double of an actor, it will be possible to create new auditory scenes, as well as dubbing a movie – preserving the actor’s voice, habits and vocal personality.
We thus aim at characterising the expressive space of a given speaker, mainly in the prosodic domain, but also for its vocal quality and articulation peculiarities.
This postdoctoral position thus consist in implementing a set of voice analysis methods in order to observe the variations of vocal source and articulation in a given set of expressive performances. Databases presenting variations of vocal effort and expressive speech are already available and labelled. They will be analysed in order to model the expressive changes in tem of variation of the vocal signal. These models will be confronted to high-level descriptions of the expressive content of the databases.

Required competences
This research requires sound knowledge of signal processing applied to speech analysis. Skills in phonetic and/or linguistic are valuable.
Teamwork skills, and deadline oriented environment is mandatory.
Candidate with signal processing, computational linguistic or acoustic phonetic background will be taken into consideration.

Research team
This position is part of the French FUI ADN T-R project. It takes place at LIMSI-CNRS (www.limsi.fr) in the Audio & Acoustic group, in collaboration with partners from the industry.
LIMSI-CNRS is a research lab located in the University Paris-Sud campus, at Orsay, south of Paris. LIMSI is internationally renown for its works on speech processing. The Audio & Acoustic group focuses more specifically on speech analysis and synthesis, real-time audio processing and expressive sound.
This project will start as soon as possible (from may 2013), and is funded by the FUI agency for a maximum of 16 months. Gross monthly salary is approximately 2500€, on the basis of CNRS post-doctoral contract.

Supervision & contact:
This postdoctoral position will be supervised by Christophe d’Alessandro and Albert Rilliard.
Applications should be send to: