This paper presents a statistical voice conversion (VC) technique with the WaveNet-based waveform generation. VC based on a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) makes it possible to convert the speaker identity of a source speaker into that of a target speaker. However, in the conventional vocoding process, various factors such as F0 extraction errors, parameterization errors and over-smoothing effects...

Voice conversion, i.e. modification of a speech signal to sound as if spoken by a different speaker, finds its use in speech synthesis with a new voice without necessity of a new database. This paper introduces two new simple non-linear methods of frequency scale mapping for transformation of voice characteristics between male and female or childish. The frequency scale mapping methods were dev...

A speaker verification system automatically accepts or rejects a claimed identity of a speaker based on a speech sample. Recently, a major progress was made in speaker verification which leads to mass market adoption, such as in smartphone and in online commerce for user authentication. A major concern when deploying speaker verification technology is whether a system is robust against spoofing...

Objectives: The present study aimed to determine the voice outcomes before and after the administration of voice therapy in patients who suffered an injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve after undergoing thyroidectomy. Methods: The sample consisted of 26 patients (2 males and 24 females) aged between 18 and 80 years (m=55±12) who experienced injury to the recurrent laryngeal nerve fol...

We present a method that determines the optimal configuration of a bilinear vocal tract length normalization function to transform the frequency axis of one voice according to a specific target voice. Given a number of parallel utterances of the involved speakers, the single parameter of this function can be calculated through an iterative procedure by minimizing an objective error measure defi...

In voice conversion, speech and signal processing techniques are used for the modification of speaker identity, i.e. for modifying the speech of a source speaker to sound as if it was spoken by a target speaker. In this paper, we describe a parametric framework for voice conversion. The parametric representation separates the speech signal into a vocal tract contribution estimated using linear ...

Introduction: Rhinosinus polyposis is associated with voice quality reduction. There has been little evidence about the efficacy of rhinosinus polyps surgery on patients' voice quality so far. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the nasality and acoustic voice changes after rhinosinus polyposis surgery.   Materials and Methods: The population in this study compo...

Cross-language voice conversion maps the speech of speaker S1 in language L1 to the voice of speaker S2 using knowledge only of how S2 speaks a different language L2. This mapping is usually performed using speech material from S1 and S2 that has been deemed “equivalent” in either acoustic or phonetic terms. This study investigates the issue of equivalence in more detail, and contrasts the perf...

Voice conversion, a technique to change one’s voice to sound like that of another, poses a threat to even high performance speaker verification system. Vulnerability of text-independent speaker verification systems under spoofing attack, using statistical voice conversion technique, was evaluated and confirmed in our previous work. In this paper, we further extend the study to text-dependent sp...