System and method for generating an identification signal for electronic devices
AssigneeNellymoser, Inc., a Massachusetts corporation
InventorsJohn Puterbaugh, Eric Puterbaugh, Peter Velikonja, Robert Baxter
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A system and method for creating a ring tone for an electronic device takes as input a phrase sung in a human voice and transforms it into a control signal controlling, for example, a ringer on a cellular telephone. Time-varying features of the input signal are analyzed to segment the signal into a set of discrete notes and assigning to each note a chromatic pitch value. The set of note start and stop times and pitches are then translated into a format suitable for controlling the device.
Claims50
A method for generating an identification signal, comprising:
- accepting as input a monophonic audio signal of limited duration;
- translating said monophonic audio signal to a representation of a series of discrete tones;
- and
- producing a control signal from said representation of discrete tones, said control signal suitable for causing a transponder to generate a signal,
- where said generated signal is a translation of said monophonic audio signal;
- wherein translating said monophonic audio signal to the representation of the series of discrete tones includes segmenting the monophonic audio signal into a series of segments according to time varying features of the audio signal that include a feature associated with energy and a feature associated with spectral composition, wherein each tone in the series of discrete tones is associated with a different segment in the series of segments.
A method for generating an identification signal, comprising:
- accepting as input a voice signal of limited duration;
- translating said voice signal to a representation of a series of discrete tones;
- and
- producing a control signal from said representation of discrete tones, said control signal suitable for causing a transponder to generate a signal,
- where said generated signal is a translation of said voice signal;
- wherein translating said voice signal to the representation of the series of discrete tones includes segmenting the voice signal into a series of segments according to time varying features of the voice signal that include a feature associated with energy and a feature associated with spectral composition, wherein each tone in the series of discrete tones is associated with a different segment in the series of segments.
The method of clam 2 wherein the feature associated with spectral composition includes a cepstral coefficient.
Apparatus for generating an identification signal comprising:
- a voice signal receiver;
- a translator having as its input a voice signal received by said voice signal receiver and having as its output a representation of discrete tones where an audio presentation of said discrete tones would be human-recognizable as a translation of said voice signal;
- wherein the translator includes an estimation module with outputs of a time varying feature associated with each of energy and spectral composition from the voice signal and a segmentation module responsive to the time varying features with an output of a segmentation of the voice signal into a series of segments according to the time varying features, such that each in the series of output discrete tones is associated with a different segment in the series of segments.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.