A new approach to synthetic voice generation and modification is described. One aspect of the approach is that no attempt is made to parametrize voices, unlike the commonly used Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) paradigm and the newer eigenvoice techniques. Instead, a straightforward unit selection approach is adopted. A second aspect is that we systematically examine mixing units from different voi...

A flexible analysis—synthesis system with signal dependent features is described and used to realize some desired voice characteristics insynthesized speech. The intelligibility of synthetic speech appears to depend on the ability to reproduce dynamic sounds such as stops, whereas the quality of voice is mainly determined by the true reproduction of voiced segments. We describe our work in conv...

Statistical methods for voice conversion are usually based on a single model selected in order to represent a tradeoff between goodness of fit and complexity. In this paper we assume that the best model may change over time, depending on the source acoustic features. We present a new method for spectral voice conversion called Dynamic Model Selection (DMS), in which a set of potential best mode...

The conversion method from Non-Audible Murmur (NAM) to ordinary speech based on the statistical voice conversion (NAM-toSpeech) has been proposed towards realization of “silent speech telephone.” Although NAM-to-Speech converts NAM to intelligible voices with similar quality to speech, there is still a large problem, i.e., difficulties of the F0 estimation from unvoiced speech. In order to avoi...

Singing voice synthesis has found numerous applications in the entertainment industry over the recent years. The template-based personalized singing voice synthesis method is a new method of generating high quality singing voice, which synthesizes the singing voice by means of conversion from the narrated lyrics of a song. In this synthesis method, template speaking and singing voices are first...

We have so far proposed a speaking-aid system for laryngectomees using a statistical voice conversion technique. In the proposed system, artificial speech articulated with extremely small sound source signals is detected with a Non-Audible Murmur (NAM)microphone, and then, the detected artificial speech is converted into more natural voice in a probabilistic manner. Although this system basical...

This paper presents a novel voice conversion system based on codebook mapping. A new phoneme-tied weighting strategy is proposed to reduce the smoothing effects in weighted sum of code books, while a new prosodic conversion method by decision tree is proposed to cope with the complex prosody of Chinese. STRAIGHT algorithm is used to decompose spectrum and excitation for separate modification. L...

Spoken language conversion is the challenge of using synthesis systems to generate utterances in the voice of a speaker but in a language unknown to the speaker. Previous approaches have been based on voice conversion and voice adaptation technologies applied to the output of a foreign language TTS system. This inevitably reduces the quality and intelligibility of the output, since the source s...

Text-to-Speech (TTS) is a useful technology that converts any text into a speech signal. It can be utilized for various purposes, e.g. car navigation, announcements in railway stations, response services in telecommunications, and e-mail reading. Corpus-based TTS makes it possible to dramatically improve the naturalness of synthetic speech compared with the early TTS. However, no general-purpos...

Although voice conversion (VC) algorithms have achieved remarkable success along with the development of machine learning, superior performance is still difficult to achieve when using nonparallel data. In this paper, we propose using a cycle-consistent adversarial network (CycleGAN) for nonparallel data-based VC training. A CycleGAN is a generative adversarial network (GAN) originally develope...