I've seen some people attempt to make a voice gender recognizer through machine learning, but nothing that has actually worked well. I'm not an ML expert, but I expect they're overfitting on just a small subset of accents and specific formants. The one I played with (can't find the link) was just trying to show weight vs resonance, and it got very confused by my voice. I am never misgendered from my voice but I (intentionally) have a slightly deeper femme voice than what it had been trained on.
IMO, the best way to learn to control your voice is to learn to hear variations in size, weight, pitch, open quotient, prosody, etc. From there you can become your own coach so you're not focused on an app while having a real world conversation with someone. Would a gamified version help? Possibly.
(sorry for the delay, I have no idea if you'll see this. I wrote it last week but apparently never pressed the submit button??)
More or less everything changes. For trans men who are on HRT the voice's lowest pitch will get lower, as it would for someone AMAB going through puberty (since a second puberty is literally what's happening on HRT). Trans women do not get any voice changes from HRT though, so they train to raise their larynx when speaking to get up into the "perceived female range."
But pitch is far from the only thing that someone gendered one way or another in western culture (and presumably elsewhere). Resonance, weight, breathing patterns, word choice, and prosody all matter too. That's way too much to go into in a post here on HN, but the easiest one to understand is resonance or "size." Female-perceived speakers have higher resonance / smaller size. This means that some of the higher harmonics are amplified more than the lower harmonics, an it's called a "small size" because the actual resonating area from the larynx to the tongue is made smaller (mostly through tongue placement). Male-perceived speakers do the opposite, creating a larger space for resonance and resulting in a lowered resonance.
I know quite a few cis people who are also going through some of this training to help with their voice acting, or even just for fun.
There are a lot of good (and unfortunately some bad) resources online for trans voice training in both directions. My personal favorite (and where I started my lessons) is Seattle Voice Labs, but Online Vocal Coach / Vox Nova is also a great resource.
The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.
I'm referring to speaking, not singing. After a _lot_ of work, I can speak passably as a woman or man and switch freely between the two. Depending on context I generally choose just one for the entire conversation, as switching tends to cause whiplash in the listener (^_^).
Vocal lessons are both a lot of fun and a lot of work. I haven't been using any voiceprint systems but I know most humans are unable to tell that my trained voice is the same physical person as my old voice. Would be curious to find out if an AI voiceprint system can discern whether it's the same or not.
As a trans woman who started transitioning at 43... I agree 100%.
This article mostly discusses waist size, for which I'm in the lower quartile. But after 40 years of testosterone poisoning my underbust is above the median. Finding clothing that fits and is flattering is really difficult!
A few years back I discovered that the third-party licensing files we had used in the '90s would roll over in 2016. The format used four ASCII digits for the number of days in an otherwise binary file and the epoch was the founding of the licensing company, sometime in 1988. If they had just used a 32-bit integer instead it would have saved me a lot of headache!
DEC WARS is full of great computer jokes. It's a 1983 Usenet posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr: https://www.bsd.org/decwars.html
> It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore freedom and games to the network...
I particularly enjoyed _Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity_ by David Foster Wallace. It gave me a new appreciation of not only the last two centuries of math, but also the english language and the abuse of sentence structure, asides, and footnotes[1][2][3] for educational and entertainment purposes.
[1] so
[2] many
[3] footnotes[a]
[a] Which, I must say, I found interesting and informative[b]
We seek an experienced software engineer to conduct safety analyses, develop
functional requirements tests, and conduct design reviews for Green Hills
Software's real time operating system and the suite of C and C++ development
tools. As a Functional Safety Software Engineer, you will be responsible for
ensuring that Green Hills Software safety-critical products are safe for our
customers to use to build vehicles, medical devices, and industrial control
systems that people's lives depend on every day.
Job Requirements:
* An understanding of compilers, assemblers, linkers and debuggers and their role in developing embedded software
* An understanding of the concepts of real time operating systems
* At least two years of programming experience in high level languages, C and C++
* Experience with UNIX and with scripting in languages such as Python and shell scripts
* Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or equivalent experience
* Ability to learn and understand how complex software systems work
We're also hiring for Development, Consulting, and Testing positions, both in Santa Barbara and worldwide: http://www.ghs.com/jobs.html
I should have mentioned that I run lamson in maildir mode rather than listen on port 25. I have postfix configured to dump incoming email into a maildir, and my lamson process watches that directory.
So I guess the reason I don't use procmail (aside from it not having a release since 2001) is that postfix is sufficient :->
The primary uses for procmail tend to be running a fixed set of rules to save mail to various directories or route it as input to scripts.
My use case needs to save it to a database and make various decisions depending on the sate of the database (e.g., send notifications to anyone watching the ticket and update due dates for the support SLA). Since this database access is more efficient if the process stays connected to the database, it's better to have a long-lived process which handles mail as it comes in than to launch a new script on every incoming email.
Lamson serves as both the procmail side and the script side. It's a long-running process that routes the incoming email to the appropriate business logic internally. And since it's in Python, it's easy to integrate with our existing Django database and business logic. It's not perfect, but it works well enough that I'm not actively looking for a replacement.
I use salmon's predecessor (lamson) to process emails for an email-driven helpdesk system. Emails come in through lamson, are processed based on headers, and either attached to the support ticket they belong to or are routed to an admin for manual processing.
Lamson isn't a perfect fit for the system, but it did make it easy to get started. Unfortunately it also had a number of bugs I had to fix, since the project was defunct. I should check to see if salmon needs those fixes.
Green Hills Software | Santa Barbara, CA | Full-time | ONSITE | Embedded Software Consultant | https://www.ghs.com/jobs.html
Do you thrive on troubleshooting software problems and designing creative solutions, enjoy learning about new technology, and want to jump in and save customers in desperate need of a hero? Join our Embedded Software Consulting team!
We're called the "support" department, but we don't field calls about "my cup holder is broken." We're much more likely to have someone compile 20K lines of C++ code with optimizations for the first time and have them tell us there's a bug in the compiler; but in reality their program has some undefined behavior that happens to behave differently with optimizations on -- and it's our job to find it! (Once we discovered that the code needed three volatile keywords added, on two lines of code!)
Job Requirements:
* Learn and understand the inner workings of complex software systems
* Quickly diagnose technical problems with limited information
* Succinctly explain complex technical concepts to experts from other technical domains
* At least 2 years experience programming in high-level languages, C, and C++
We're also hiring for Development and Testing positions, both in Santa Barbara and worldwide: http://www.ghs.com/jobs.html
Green Hills Software | Santa Barbara, CA | Full-time | ONSITE | Embedded Software Consultant | https://www.ghs.com/jobs.html
We're hiring for multiple teams, both in Santa Barbara and worldwide: http://www.ghs.com/jobs.html , but I'll put in a plug for my own team of Embedded Software Consultants. We're called the "support" department, but we don't field calls about "my cup holder is broken." We're much more likely to have someone turn compile 20K lines of C++ code with optimizations for the first time and have them tell us there's a bug in the compiler; but in reality their program has some undefined behavior that happens to behave differently with optimizations on -- and it's our job to find it! (Once we discovered that the code needed three volatile keywords added, on two lines of code!)
If you thrive on troubleshooting software problems and designing creative solutions, enjoy learning about new technology, and want to jump in and save customers in desperate need of a hero, this is the job for you!
Job Requirements:
* Learn and understand the inner workings of complex software systems
* Quickly diagnose technical problems with limited information
* Succinctly explain complex technical concepts to experts from other technical domains
* At least 2 years experience programming in high-level languages, C, and C++
IMO, the best way to learn to control your voice is to learn to hear variations in size, weight, pitch, open quotient, prosody, etc. From there you can become your own coach so you're not focused on an app while having a real world conversation with someone. Would a gamified version help? Possibly.
(sorry for the delay, I have no idea if you'll see this. I wrote it last week but apparently never pressed the submit button??)