From: Steve Schear <azur@netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 18:00:27 -0800 (PST)
To: Sean Roach <roach_s@alph.swosu.edu>
Subject: Re: GSM crypto upgrade? (was Re: Newt's phone calls)
Message-ID: <199701220200.SAA16125@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


>>This is the approach taken by PGPfone also.  If the value of the
>>conversations was high (>$100,000?) passable voice imitation wouldn't
>>be that hard I suspect.
>
>I have long considered how easy it would be to use a sound card to modify
>the human voice to match within certain tolerances the voice of another.
>
>There are currently on the market, phones specifically designed to modify
>the voice of the user so that kids can answer as adults, women can answer as
>thier own protective boyfriends, bosses can answer anonymous calls as the
>secretary, etc...
>
>There are currently on the market keyboards that allow you to sample some
>real world sound and use it as a voice in your music, (the model I saw, a
>toy produced by Radio Shack, simply sped up or slowed down the sound to
>achieve this.)
>
>I have thought, if a machine were to take the incoming voice, analize
>(apologies for spelling) it to get a spectrum signature, a pattern that can
>be added or subtracted from another, and could then add the difference
>between that and the victims signature to the users voice, then real-time,
>on-the-fly con jobs would be easy.
>
>The only thing that the user would be responsible for would be the accent,
>and the day-to-day vocabulary of the victim.
>
>I told a friend about this and he confirmed that such was available if you
>knew where to look.

A friend of mine, an expert on signal processing, vocei systhesis and
recognition, showed me a journal article (think it was an IEEE) in 1990 of
some university researchers who had prototyped just such a device.  Never
followed up, but it seems entirely reasonable a practicle.  In fact I'm
surprised that Hollywood hasn't latched onto this in order to dub film
stars to different languages w/o loosing their recognizable voice
characteristics.

--Steve