Pitch-synchronous time alignment of speech signals for prosody transplantation

Prosody transplantation is a speech signal modification procedure usually used to voice transformation or to evaluate the quality of speech synthesizers. In practice, the pitch contour is mapped onto a common segmental content and the target signal is modified adjusting position and length of speech frames to achieve the desired pitch contour and time duration from a speech reference. A new algorithm for prosody transplantation is presented based on a pitch-synchronous feature extraction of the speech signal, unifying the time-aligning and pitch-modification stages. The result is a computationally efficient algorithm for prosody transplantation that maximizes the spectral similarity between the target and reference signals.