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,...

The main goal of a voice conversion system is to modify the voice of a source speaker, in order to be perceived as if it had been uttered by another specific speaker. Many approaches found in the literature convert only the features related to the vocal tract of the speaker. Our proposal is to convert those characteristics, and to process the signal passing through the vocal chords. Thus, the g...

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 describes the Voice Conversion Challenge 2016 devised by the authors to better understand different voice conversion (VC) techniques by comparing their performance on a common dataset. The task of the challenge was speaker conversion, i.e., to transform the voice identity of a source speaker into that of a target speaker while preserving the linguistic content. Using a common dataset...

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...

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 aim of voice conversion is to transform an utterance spoken by an arbitrary (source) speaker to that of a specific (target) speaker. Text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-speech translation, mimicry generation and human-machine interaction systems are among the numerous applications which can be greatly benefited by having a voice conversion module. Generally voice conversion systems require para...

Voice conversion is a technique for modifying a source speaker’s speech to sound as if it was spoken by a target speaker. The conventional solutions to this problem are based on training and applying conversion functions which require a substantial amount of training data from both the source and the target speaker. In this paper, we present a voice conversion technique that requires no preexis...

Voice conversion systems aim at modifying a source speaker’s speech so that it is perceived as if a target speaker had spoken it. Applying voice conversion techniques to a concatenative text-to-speech synthesizer allows for the personification of such systems, so that additional voices from a single source-speaker database can be produced quickly and automatically. This paper presents a new alg...