This paper presents a spectral transformation method for emotional speech synthesis based on voice conversion framework. Three emotions are studied, including anger, happiness and sadness. For the sake of high naturalness, superior speech quality and emotion expressiveness, our original STASC system is modified by introducing a new feature selection strategy and hierarchical codebook mapping pr...

Speech processing related changes in the speech spectra may often lead to unwanted changes in the effective degree of voicing, which in turn may degrade the speech quality. This phenomenon is studied more closely in this paper, first on a theoretical level and then in the context of voice conversion. Moreover, a simple but efficient approach for avoiding the unwanted changes in the effective le...

This paper proposes the application of evolutionary computation, a stochastic search technique that parallels the evolution of living organisms, to parameter adjustment for voice conversion, and reports on several experimental results applicable to the fitting of prosodic coefficients. Here, because of the difficulty involved in providing a clear fitness function for evaluating evolutionary com...

Cross-language voice conversion is useful for many applications, and we are trying to apply the technique to a language training system for reducing voice individuality differences. In this paper, we describe experiments that test effectiveness of an extension of single-language voice conversion, to include cross-language utterances. The performance was investigated by objective and perceptual ...

Voice conversion consists in transforming a source speaker voice into a target speaker voice. There are many applications of voice conversion systems where the amount of training data from the source speaker and the target speaker is different. Usually, the amount of source data available is large, but it is desired to estimate the transformation with a small amount of target data. Systems base...

-This paper evaluates suitable voice-data length in IP packets for the adjustment of VoIP network systems. Based on measurements in a real environment, we examined the voice-quality level while varying the voice-data length of IP packets under various network conditions. We found that a VoIP system with long-voice data has high-transmission efficiency but there is a high deterioration in the vo...

This paper describes a novel exemplar-based spectral conversion (SC) system developed by the AST (Academia Sinica, Taipei) team for the 2016 voice conversion challenge (vcc2016). The key feature of our system is that it integrates the locally linear embedding (LLE) algorithm, a manifold learning algorithm that has been successfully applied for the super-resolution task in image processing, with...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate how voice is realized by Iranian EFL learners in persuasive English and Persian text types. This discourse-related notion is a required criterion for writing acceptable English. However, L2 learners from cultures other than English might face problems in realizing it, or even ignore it all through their writing. In this connection, the present st...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate how voice is realized by Iranian EFL learners in persuasive English and Persian text types. This discourse-related notion is a required criterion for writing acceptable English. However, L2 learners from cultures other than English might face problems in realizing it, or even ignore it all through their writing. In this connection, the present st...