CROSS-LINGUAL VOICE CONVERSION Cross-lingual voice conversion refers to the automatic transformation of a source speaker’s voice to a target speaker’s voice in a language that the target speaker can not speak. It involves a set of statistical analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning, and signal processing techniques. This study focuses on the problems related to cross-lingual voice conve...

Voice conversion technologies transform individual characteristics of speech patterns while preserving the original content, and can be widely used in speech processing. Considering limited system resources, in particular, of embedded concatenative speech synthesis, voice conversion may reduce the memory consumption of the acoustic database. Voice conversion enables the intra-gender or cross-ge...

Voice conversion is a technique for producing utterances using any target speakers’ voice from a single source speaker’s utterance. In this paper, we apply cross-language voice conversion between Japanese and English to a system based on a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) method and STRAIGHT, a high quality vocoder. To investigate the effects of this conversion system across different languages, we...

In practical applications of voice conversion, it is necessary to be able to cope with small amounts of speaker-specific training data. Consequently, most of the proposed voice conversion algorithms are based on probabilistic conversion functions. Recently, however, there has been increased interest in unit selection based approaches for voice conversion. It is evident that typical training set...

This work addresses a study of the GMM-based approach to achieve full-quality speaker timbre conversion. In general, high-quality voice conversion requires accurate spectral envelope estimates, resulting in high-dimensional feature vectors and relatively high computational. Aiming to achieve lowdimensional processing, accurate envelope estimates of the speakers are mel-frequency scaled and proj...

An application-specific perceptual evaluation was carried out in order to compare six high-quality German text-to-speech systems. Subjects judged the systems’ reading of an email message and a newspaper article according to four applicationspecific questions and six voice quality attributes. The results indicate significant differences between the systems. Possible applications of the systems w...

Voice conversion aims at converting speech from one speaker to sound as if it was spoken by another specific speaker. The most popular voice conversion approach based on Gaussian mixture modeling tends to suffer either from model overfitting or oversmoothing. To overcome the shortcomings of the traditional approach, we recently proposed to use dynamic kernel partial least squares (DKPLS) regres...

The present study explored the intensity level of authorial voice in relation to the quality of argumentative writing. 42 undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language (36 girls and 6 boys) spent 45 minutes to individually complete in-class position-taking writing tasks for three weeks. Their overall academic writing quality scores assigned based on portfolio assessment were studied i...

A novel tone quality improvement method for a bone conduction voice is presented. In the present method, the tone quality of the bone conduction voice is converted to the similar quality of the air conduction voice. For the voice conversion, the present method uses a codebook, which consists of various paired code vectors of the bone and air conduction voices. The deltaand mel-cepstral coeffici...