Voice Cloning for Thierry Ardisson

Reconstructing the voices of personalities from the past

Ircam Amplify creates unique voice technology for Thierry Ardisson’s new interview series “Hôtel du Temps”.

“Hotel du Temps” is a biopic, of a new kind, which uses “Voice Cloning” to reconstruct the voices of the world’s greatest legends after they’ve gone and make them tell their lives.

Voice Cloning uses the technological process of vocal reconstruction to make it possible to automatically reproduce all the emotions and dynamic articulations of an existing voice, moving vocal reconstruction far beyond cobbling together snippets of old recordings.

This cutting-edge product from Ircam Amplify requires only a few dozen minutes of analysis to determine a speaker’s unique vocal characteristics. By using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI), Voice Cloning is able to not only discover all the unique characteristics of a person’s voice, but also learn to reproduce them.

The second phase of Voice Cloning as used in “Hôtel du Temps”, happens when an actor reads the words of the late celebrity without needing to mimic the original speaker’s voice tone, cadence or speech patterns.

Voice Cloning then “dresses” this base with the unique qualities and characteristics of the original speaker’s voice and applies all the details required to make a perfect recreation of a lost voice.

Voice Cloning from Ircam Amplify is based on the technologies and expertise of IRCAM.

With:

Ircam Amplify

• Nicolas Pingnelain, Head of Sales
• Frederic Amadu, CTO
• Elias Karam, Project Manager

IRCAM

• Sylvain Cadars, Sound Engineer

Researcher at Mixed Research Unit for Music and Sound Sciences and Technologies (the CNRS, Sorbonne University, the Ministry of Culture and IRCAM):

• Axel Roebel, Head of the Sound Analysis and Synthesis team
• Nicolas Obin, Professor-Researcher

With the support of the French National Research Agency in the framework of TheVoice and ARS projects

Photo: ©François Roelants