This paper presents a comparison of methods for transforming voice quality in neutral synthetic speech to match cheerful, aggressive, and depressed expressive styles. Neutral speech is generated using the unit selection system in the MARY TTS platform and a large neutral database in German. The output is modified using voice conversion techniques to match the target expressive styles, the focus...

Most of the current voice conversion systems model the joint density of source and target features using a Gaussian mixture model. An inherent property of this approach is that the source and target features have to be properly aligned for the training. It is intuitively clear that the accuracy of the alignment has some effect on the conversion quality but this issue has not been thoroughly stu...

Voice conversion techniques attempt to modify speech signal so that it is perceived as if spoken by another speaker, different from the original speaker. In this paper, we present a novel approach to perform voice conversion. Our approach uses acoustic models based on units of speech, like phones and diphones, for voice conversion. These models can be computed and used independently for a given...

Voice conversion (VC) technology allows to transform the voice of the source speaker so that it is perceived as the voice of a target speaker. One of the applications of VC is speech-to-speech translation where the voice has to inform, not only about what is said, but also about who is the speaker. This paper introduces the different methods submitted by UPC to the TC-STAR second evaluation cam...

Recently, voice conversion has becoming the research hotspot, because of its widely application areas. However, the voice conversion technology is still immature. By the researching of existing voice conversion models, the voice conversion system based on the RBF neutral network was designed, and the system simulation was implemented. During conversion, the unvoiced speech was excluded and the ...

A new voice conversion method that improves the quality of the voice conversion output at higher sampling rates is proposed. Speaker Transformation Algorithm Using Segmental Codebooks (STASC) is modified to process source and target speech spectra in different subbands. The new method ensures better conversion at sampling rates above 16KHz. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is employed for subba...

This paper presents a novel statistical singing voice conversion (SVC) technique with direct waveform modification based on the spectrum differential that can convert voice timbre of a source singer into that of a target singer without using a vocoder to generate converted singing voice waveforms. SVC makes it possible to convert singing voice characteristics of an arbitrary source singer into ...

This paper presents a novel method of enhancing esophageal speech using statistical voice conversion. Esophageal speech is one of the alternative speaking methods for laryngectomees. Although it doesn’t require any external devices, generated voices usually sound unnatural compared with normal speech. To improve the intelligibility and naturalness of esophageal speech, we propose a voice conver...

A new voice conversion method that improves the quality of the voice conversion output at higher sampling rates is proposed. Speaker Transformation Algorithm Using Segmental Codebooks (STASC) is modified to process source and target speech spectra in different subbands. The new method ensures better conversion at sampling rates above 16KHz. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is employed for subba...