Introduction: Patients with muscle tension dysphonia (MTD) suffer from several physical discomforts in their vocal tract. However, few studies have examined the effects of voice therapy (VT) on the vocal tract discomfort (VTD) in patients with voice disorders. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of VT on the VTD in patients with MTD.   Materi...

In voice conversion, sparse-representation-based methods have recently been garnering attention because they are, relatively speaking, not affected by over-fitting or over-smoothing problems. In these approaches, voice conversion is achieved by estimating a sparse vector that determines which dictionaries of the target speaker should be used, calculated from the matching of the input vector and...

In emotional speech research, it has been suggested that loudness, along with other prosodic features, may be an important cue in communicating high activation affects. In earlier studies, we found different voice quality stimuli to be consistently associated with certain affective states. In these stimuli, as in typical human productions, the different voice qualities entailed differences in l...

This study compared the voice quality of high and low falling unchecked and checked tones. Spectral tilt measured as H0A2 was taken from the syllable midpoint of second, third and four syllables in SVO sentences. Results showed that the voice quality of checked tones was not always creakier than unchecked tones. The voice quality of a syllable at the end of an utterance was not creakier than a ...

This paper presents a new voice conversion method called Weighted Frequency Warping (WFW), which combines the well known GMM approach and the frequency warping approach. The harmonic plus stochastic model has been used to analyze, modify and synthesize the speech signal. Special phase manipulation procedures have been designed to allow the system to work in pitch-asynchronous mode. The experime...

This paper tries to introduce a new strategy and tools for voice quality research that complements conventional approaches. A very high-quality speech analysis, modification and synthesis procedure STRAIGHT, which is basically a channel VOCODER based on a pitch-synchronous analysis synthesis framework, was extended to implement auditory morphing in terms of spectral, pitch and voice quality par...

Prosody plays an important role in neutral-to-emotional voice conversion. Prosodic features like pitch are usually estimated and altered at a segmental level based on short windowing of speech signal (where the signal is expected to be quasi-stationary). This results in a frame-wise change of acoustical parameters for synthesizing emotionalized speech. In order to convert a neutral speech to an...

From speech, speaker identity can be mostly characterized by the spectro-temporal structures of spectrum. Although recent researches have demonstrated the effectiveness of employing long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network (RNN) in voice conversion, traditional LSTM-RNN based approaches usually focus on temporal evolutions of speech features only. In this paper, we improve the con...