This study presents an approach to GMM-based speech conversion using maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) adaptation. First, a conversion function is trained using a parallel corpus containing the same utterances spoken by both the source and the reference speakers. Then a non-parallel corpus from a new target speaker is used for the adaptation of the conversion function which models the voic...

Studies show that professional singing matches well the associated melody and typically exhibits spectra different from speech in resonance tuning and singing formant. Therefore, one of the important topics in speech-to-singing conversion is to characterize the spectral transformation between speech and singing. This paper extends two types of spectral transformation techniques, namely voice co...

Different voice qualities tend to vary in terms of their intrinsic loudness. Perceptual experiments have shown that voice quality variation can be strongly associated with the affective colouring of an utterance. The question addressed in this paper concerns the role that the intrinsic loudness variation might play in this voice quality-to-affect mapping. To test the hypothesis that the intrins...

In this paper, we describe a voice transformation meth-od which changes source speaker's acoustic features to those of a target speaker. The method developed here, acoustic features are divided into two parts, linear and nonlinear parts. Linear parts are characterized by LPC cepstrum coe cients which are obtained from LP analysis. As for nonlinear part, which represent the excitation signal, is...

This paper deals with the design of a synthesis database for a high quality corpus-based Speech Synthesis system in Spanish. The database has been designed for speech synthesis, speech conversion and expressive speech. The design follows the specifications of TC-STAR project and has been applied to collect equivalent English and Mandarin synthesis databases. The sentences of the corpus have bee...

Auditory voice quality judgements are used intensively for the clinical assessment of pathological voice. Voice quality concepts are fuzzily defined and poorly standardized however, which hinders scientific and clinical communication. The described database documents a wide variety of pathologies and is used to investigate auditory voice quality concepts with regard to phonation mechanisms. The...

Voice conversion is an emergent problem in voice and speech processing with increasing commercial interest, due to applications such as Speech-to-Speech Translation (SST) and personalized Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems. A Voice Conversion system should allow the mapping of acoustical features of sentences pronounced by a source speaker to values corresponding to the voice of a target speaker, in ...

We proposed a speaking aid system using statistical voice conversion for laryngectomees, whose vocal folds have been removed. This paper investigates the influence of various small sound sources on the voice conversion accuracy. Spectral envelopes and power of sound sources are controlled independently. In total 8 different kinds of sound source signals, e.g. pulse train, sierra wave and so on,...