background: one third of patients with parkinson’s disease (pd) have mentioned “dysphonia” as their most debilitating communication deficit. patient-based measurements, such as voice handicap index (vhi) add necessary supplementary information to clinical and physiological assessment. there are a few studies about relation between vhi and disease severity in pd, although none of them showed any...

This paper reports the results of perception tests administered to speakers of Japanese as part of a cross-language investigation of how voice quality and f0 combine in the signalling of affect. Three types of synthesised stimuli were presented: (1) ‘VQ only’ involving variations in voice quality and a neutral f0; (2) ‘f0 only’, with different f0 contours and modal voice; and (3) combined ‘VQ +...

Voice adaptation describes the process of converting the output of a text-to-speech synthesizer voice to sound like a different voice after a training process in which only a small amount of the desired target speaker’s speech is seen. We employ a locally linear conversion function based on Gaussian mixture models to map bark-scaled line spectral frequencies. We compare performance for three di...

Reports indicate that one of the causes of harmful to the genital system, especially the testes is stress. Result of damage to testicular quality certainly will affect the quality of sperm fertility. Stress could be created secondarily after some pathological conditions such as neurological diseases or environmental factors. One of the causes of stress could be scary voices, such as cat voice f...

— Convivo is a VoIP system designed to provide reliable voice communication for poor quality networks, especially those found in rural areas of the developing world. Convivo introduces an original approach to maintain voice communication interaction in the presence of poor network performance: an Interface-Adaptation mechanism that adjusts the user interface in order to reduce the impact of hig...

This article presents an experimental comparison of two types of techniques, articulatory and acoustic, for transforming nonnative speech to sound more native-like. Articulatory techniques use articulators from a native speaker to drive an articulatory synthesizer of the non-native speaker. These methods have a good theoretical justification, but articulatory measurements (e.g., via electromagn...

Skype, one of the popular VoIP applications, has its own redundancy mechanism to mitigate the impact of packet loss at the expense of additional bandwidth usage. However, the benefit of voice quality improvement through redundancy is reduced greatly in the case of consecutive loss of Skype packets. When Skype is running over wireless networks, the high likelihood of having consecutive packet lo...

In this paper, we first provide a review of the state-of-the-art emotional voice conversion research, and existing speech databases. We then motivate development novel database (ESD) that addresses increasing research need. With ESD database1 is now made available to community. The consists 350 parallel utterances spoken by 10 native English Chinese speakers covers 5 emotion categories (neutral...

A polyglot speech synthesizer, synthesizes speech for any given monolingual or multilingual text, in a single speaker’s voice. In this regard, a polyglot speech corpus is required. It is difficult to find a speaker proficient in multiple languages. Therefore, in the current work, by exploiting the acoustic similarity of phonemes across Indian languages, a polyglot speech corpus is obtained for ...

This paper proposes a feature mapping algorithm based on the trajectory GMM or trajectory HMM. Although the GMM or HMM-based feature mapping algorithm works effectively, its conversion quality sometimes degrades due to the inappropriate dynamic characteristics caused by the frame-by-frame conversion. While the use of dynamic features can alleviate this problem, it also introduces an inconsisten...