Developing a Voice Analysis System for Novice Anime Voice Actors: A Fundamental Frequency Based Approach

Japanese animated-cartoon series, commonly referred to as anime has significantly influenced global pop culture. In Japan, many young people aspire to become anime voice actors, however, the market is extremely competitive. Therefore, analytical tools are needed to support novice voice actors. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a web application that allows any voice actors to understand more about their voice quality by uploading their voice samples. The basic approach is to analyze vocal fundamental frequency which has been pointed out to be one of the key acoustic features in previous research. By analyzing voice samples of anime voice actors, we have grouped them based on gender and age features, and personality traits with four categories in each group. Upon this benchmark, our web application categorizes uploaded samples by aspiring voice actors, providing them useful information about the orientation of their voice. We tested the web service with 17 users and most of them found the application to be useful. While existing research has mainly focused on analyzing voice quality, the concentration and contribution of this paper have been to make the result of such analyses useful for novice voice actors.