Common voice conversion systems employ a spectral / time domain mapping to convert speech from one speaker to another. The speech quality of conversion methods does not sound natural because the spectral / time domain patterns of two speakers’ speech do not match completely. In this paper we propose a method that uses inter-frame (dynamic) characteristics in addition to intra-frame characterist...

This paper proposes speaking-aid systems based on one-to-many eigenvoice conversion (EVC) for enhancing three types of alaryngeal speech: esophageal speech; electrolaryngeal speech; and body-conducted silent electrolaryngeal speech. Although alaryngeal speech allows laryngectomees to utter speech sounds, it suffers from lack of naturalness and speaker individuality. To improve the sound quality...

This article presents a new algorithm used in order to convert the speech of one speaker so that it sounds like that of another speaker. This algorithm flexibly converts voice quality using two major technical developments. Firstly, the modification of formant frequencies and spectral intensity using piecewise linear voice conversion rules. This enables the control of spectrum parameters in det...

A cross-lingual voice conversion system aims at modifying the timbral structure of recorded sentences from a source speaker, in order to obtain processed sentences which are perceived as the same sentences uttered by a target speaker. This work presents the cross-lingual voice conversion problem as a network of related sub-problems and discuss several techniques for solving each of these sub-pr...

Voice conversion involves transforming segments of speech from a source speaker to make them to be perceived as if spoken by a target speaker. Generally, this process involves the estimation of vocal tract parameters and an excitation signal that match the target speaker. The work presented here proposes an algorithm for estimating the excitation residuals of the target speaker using a weighted...

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank to my thesis supervisor Assoc. Prof. Levent M. Arslan for his guidance and support. It was a great pleasure to work with him during this thesis and in all the projects we have been involved in the last three years. I would like to thank Prof. reading my thesis and participating in my thesis committee. I would like to thank to my family and to Aylin for...

This paper presents techniques to improve the quality of voices generated through statistical singing voice conversion with direct waveform modification based on spectrum differential (DIFFSVC). The DIFFSVC method makes it possible to convert singing voice characteristics of a source singer into those of a target singer without using vocoder-based waveform generation. However, quality of the co...

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...

This paper proposes a new training method of deep neural networks (DNNs) for statistical voice conversion. DNNs are now being used as conversion models that represent mapping from source features to target features in statistical voice conversion. However, there are two major problems to be solved in conventional DNN-based voice conversion: 1) the inconsistency between the training and synthesi...

In expressive speech synthesis, a key challenge is the generation of flexibly varying expressive tone while maintaining the high quality achieved with unit selection speech synthesis methods. Existing approaches have either concentrated on achieving high synthesis quality with no flexibility, or they have aimed at parametric models, requiring the use of parametric synthesis technologies such as...