Suppose I have a voice of a man and want to manipulate the sound to be woman like, I see that there are many factors involved. As simply changing the pitch will make it sound weird.
What are all the factors involved if I want to be able to manipulate voices around and make a sound of one person to be like another person? What are some of the tools i should be looking for? Or is it not possible?
A voice is a very complex sound pattern. While you can manipulate a male voice to sound feminine or vice versa, getting it to sound like a particular person is probably going to be pretty difficult since the patterns of frequencies differ in complex ways.
Think about it this way, think about voice synthesis and how we can't even make a computer generate a sound that isn't recognizably computer generated. We'd have a similar problem trying to make one voice sound like another. If they are fairly close, it might be possible to get it a little closer, but not like they do in movies.
It isn't simply pitch from the vocal cords that determines the 'maleness' of a voice, but also how the spectral peaks and resonances are influenced by the shape of the skull, sinuses and chest cavity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formant has a discussion of these influences and where the different peaks live. Knowing these can help you 'tune' a vocal waveform a little better.
