In the voice conversion algorithm based on the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), quality of the converted speech is degraded because the converted spectrum is exceedingly smoothed. In this paper, we newly propose the GMM-based algorithm with the Dynamic Frequency Warping (DFW) to avoid the over-smoothing. We also propose that the converted spectrum is calculated by mixing the GMM-based converted sp...

Often a face has voice. Appearance sometimes strong relationship with one's In this work, we study how can be converted to voice, which is face-based voice conversion. Since there no clean dataset that contains and speech, conversion faces difficult learning low-quality problems caused by background noise or echo. Too much redundant information for face-to-voice also causes synthesis of general...

In voice conversion, a simple frame-level mean and variance normalization is typically used for fundamental frequency (F0) transformation, which is text-independent and requires no parallel training data. Some advanced methods transform pitch contours instead, but require either parallel training data or syllabic annotations. We propose a method which retains the simplicity and text-independenc...

This paper presents a method for making nonaudible murmur (NAM) enhancement based on statistical voice conversion (VC) robust against external noise. NAM, which is an extremely soft whispered voice, is a promising medium for silent speech communication thanks to its faint volume. Although such a soft voice can still be detected with a special body-conductive microphone, its quality significantl...

The performance of voice conversion has been considerably improved through statistical modeling of spectral sequences. However, the converted speech still contains traces of artificial sounds. To alleviate this, it is necessary to statistically model a source sequence as well as a spectral sequence. In this paper, we introduce STRAIGHT mixed excitation to a framework of the voice conversion bas...

This paper presents three new speech databases for standard Basque. They are designed primarily for corpus-based synthesis but each database has its specific purpose: 1) AhoSyn: high quality speech synthesis (recorded also in Spanish), 2) AhoSpeakers: voice conversion and 3) AhoEmo3: emotional speech synthesis. The whole corpus design and the recording process are described with detail. Once th...

A voice adaptation system enables users to quickly create new voices for a text-to-speech system, allowing for the personalization of the synthesis output. The system adapts to the pitch and spectrum of the target speaker, using a probabilistic, locally linear conversion function based on a Gaussian Mixture Model. Numerical and perceptual evaluations reveal insights into the correlation between...

We have already proposed using evolutionary computation to adjust the voice quality conversion parameters, and we have reported that this approach produces results that are not only closer to the desired target than the results of parameter adjustment based on designer experience or trial and error, but which also have relatively little sound quality degradation. In this paper we propose improv...