Independent Manipulation of High-level Spectral Envelope Shape Features for Sound Morphing by Means of Evolutionary Computation

The aim of sound morphing is to obtain a sound that falls perceptually between two (or more) sounds. Ideally, we want to morph perceptually relevant features of sounds and be able to independently manipulate them. In this work we present a method to obtain perceptually intermediate spectral envelopes guided by highlevel spectral shape descriptors and a technique that employs evolutionary computation to independently manipulate the timbral features captured by the descriptors. High-level descriptors are measures of the acoustic correlates of salient timbre dimensions derived from perceptual studies, such that the manipulation of the descriptors corresponds to potentially interesting timbral variations.