GRASP

The purpose of this project is to develop an instrument capable of being used in live performance for the presentation of new music/new media works involving realtime synthesis of speech and song, as well as supplying controlled audio playback and video manipulation. All of this is achieved through gestural control by way of cybergloves and position trackers.

GRASSP is an expansion of GloveTalk II (Fels and Hinton), a gestural speech synthesis system that uses a Cyberglove, custom-designed left hand glove, a Polhemus tracker, and a foot pedal.

GRASSP expands on the capabilities of GloveTalk in a number of ways:

• it has been refactored in Max/MSP to take advantage of the realtime performance possibilites of that language;
• besides speech synthesis it can control sound diffusion and video processing through the use of the UBCToolbox (Max/MSP/Jitter);
• it has tested the ability of a skilled user to synthesize speech without the use of machine learning;
• it has both speech and song modes, providing for a greater variety of timbre and emotion in performance.