Transforming F0 contours

Voice transformation is the process of transforming the characteristics of speech uttered by a source speaker, such that a listener would believe the speech was uttered by a target speaker. Training F0 contour generation models for speech synthesis requires a large corpus of speech. If it were possible to adapt the F0 contour of one speaker to sound like that of another speaker, using a small, easily obtainable parameter set, this would be extremely valuable. We present a new method for the transformation of F0 contours from one speaker to another based on a small linguistically motivated parameter set. The system performs a piecewise linear mapping using these parameters. A perceptual experiment clearly demonstrates that the presented system is at least as good as an existing technique for all speaker pairs, and that in many cases it is much better and almost as good as using the target F0 contour.