I would guess that Shimon’s voice could have been almost anything—why choose this particular voice?
Gil Weinberg: Since we did not have singing voice synthesis expertise in our Robotic Musicianship group at Georgia Tech, we looked to collaborate with other groups. The Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University developed a remarkable deep learning-based singing voice synthesizer and was excited to collaborate. As part of the process, we sent them audio files of songs recorded by one of our students to be used as a dataset to train their neural network. At the end, we decided to use another voice that was trained on a different dataset, since we felt it better represented Shimon’s genderless personality and was a better fit to the melodic register of our songs.
