Voice conversion (VC) is a technique for converting a source speaker’s voice into another speaker’s voice without changing linguistic information. As a typical approach to VC, a statistical method based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used widely. A GMM is trained as a conversion model using a parallel data set composed of many utterance-pairs of source and target speakers. Although this fra...

Voice transformation (VT) aims to change one or more aspects of a speech signal while preserving linguistic information. A subset of VT, Voice conversion (VC) specifically aims to change a source speaker’s speech in such a way that the generated output is perceived as a sentence uttered by a target speaker. Despite many years of research, VC systems still exhibit deficiencies in accurately mimi...

Voice quality is recognized to play an important role for the rendering of emotions in verbal communication. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of a sinusoidal modeling processing framework for voice transformations finalized to the analysis and synthesis of emotive speech. A set of acoustic cues is selected to compare the voice quality characteristics of the speech signals on a voice c...

Thanks to the growing availability of spoofing databases and rapid advances in using them, systems for detecting voice spoofing attacks are becoming more and more capable, and error rates close to zero are being reached for the ASVspoof2015 database. However, speech synthesis and voice conversion paradigms that are not considered in the ASVspoof2015 database are appearing. Such examples include...

This paper presents a new scheme for developing a voice conversion system that modiies the utterance of a source speaker to sound like speech from a target speaker. We refer to the method as Speaker Transformation Algorithm using Segmen-tal Codebooks (STASC). Two new methods are described to perform the transformation of vocal tract and glottal excita-tion characteristics across speakers. In ad...

This paper proposes a discriminative learning method for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF)-based Voice Conversion (VC). NMF-based VC has been researched because of the natural-sounding voice it produces compared with conventional Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based VC. In conventional NMF-based VC, parallel exemplars are used as the dictionary; therefore, dictionary learning is not adopted....

This paper presents a new voice conversion algorithm which modiies the utterance of a source speaker to sound like speech from a target speaker. We refer to the method as Speaker Transformation Algorithm using Segmental Codebooks (STASC). A novel method is proposed which nds accurate alignments between source and target speaker utterances. Using the alignments, source speaker acoustic character...

This paper presents a new voice conversion algorithm which modi®es the utterance of a source speaker to sound-like speech from a target speaker. We refer to the method as Speaker Transformation Algorithm using Segmental Codebooks (STASC). A novel method is proposed which ®nds accurate alignments between source and target speaker utterances. Using the alignments, source speaker acoustic characte...