Voice conversion using General Regression Neural Network

The objective of voice conversion system is to formulate the mapping function which can transform the source speaker characteristics to that of the target speaker. In this paper, we propose the General Regression Neural Network (GRNN) based model for voice conversion. It is a single pass learning network that makes the training procedure fast and comparatively less time consuming. The proposed system uses the shape of the vocal tract, the shape of the glottal pulse (excitation signal) and long term prosodic features to carry out the voice conversion task. In this paper, the shape of the vocal tract and the shape of source excitation of a particular speaker are represented using Line Spectral Frequencies (LSFs) and Linear Prediction (LP) residual respectively. GRNN is used to obtain the mapping function between the source and target speakers. The direct transformation of the time domain residual using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) causes phase change and generates artifacts in consecutive frames. In order to alleviate it, wavelet packet decomposed coefficients are used to characterize the excitation of the speech signal. The long term prosodic parameters namely, pitch contour (intonation) and the energy profile of the test signal are also modified in relation to that of the target (desired) speaker using the baseline method. The relative performances of the proposed model are compared to voice conversion system based on the state of the art RBF and GMM models using objective and subjective evaluation measures. The evaluation measures show that the proposed GRNN based voice conversion system performs slightly better than the state of the art models. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.