“Ethics of emotional vocal transformations”
Nadia Guerouaou, PHD student in the PDS team, presents her work on the ethics of emotional vocal transformations as part of her thesis co-supervised by Jean-Julien Aucouturier and Guillaume Vaiva (Director of the Centre National de Ressources et Résilience - CN2R)
This seminar on Wednesday, February 9, 2022 is part of the STMS Wednesdays at 12pm, in the Stravinsky room at Ircam.
It can be seen on Ircam's YouTube channel at: : https://youtu.be/YQzM9surOxA et on the MEDIA site of Ircam: https://medias.ircam.fr/xb6c5c4_ethique-des-transformations-vocales-emotio
Abstract:
In recent years, the application of technological innovations to the creation of fake images, sounds and videos (deep-fakes or hyper fakes) has caused great concern in our societies. This is evidenced by the media hype about the danger of these deep-fakes (e.g. in French: https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-pieds-sur-terre/un-amour-fou, the Black Mirror series, and so on). However, no academic study has yet examined the moral perception of the general public: are these uses morally acceptable, and under what conditions? As voice transformation technologies are part of the tools developed and supported by various research projects at IRCAM, it seemed essential to us to look into the specific question of "voice filters". Inspired by the studies on the ethics of autonomous vehicles (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Autonomous-Vehicles-Need-Experimental-Ethics%3A-Are-Bonnefon-Shariff/13d456d4c53d7b03b90ba59845a8f61b23b9f6e8), we conducted an experimental ethics study on 300 people, through the presentations of a number of hypothetical scenarios for the application of emotional voice transformations: from the call-center employee who transforms the voice of dissatisfied consumers to hear their anger less, to the actress who makes her voice less tense to mask her stage fright, as well as therapeutic situations (treating stress by calming the sound of her voice).
These are the results of this study (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2021.0083) that I will present on Wednesday, February 9 at 2:00 pm.