Evaluation of methods for parameteric formant transformation in voice conversion

Author

Turajlic, Emir ; Rentzos, Dimitrios ; Vaseghi, Saeed ; Ho, Ching-Hsiang

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electron. & Comput. Eng., Brunel Univ., Uxbridge, UK

Volume

1

fYear

2003

fDate

6-10 April 2003

Abstract

This paper explores methods of estimation and mapping of parametric formant-based models for voice transformation. The main focus is the transformation of the parameters of a model of the vocal tract of a source speaker to a target speaker. The vocal tract parameters are represented with the linear prediction (LP) model coefficients and the associated formant frequencies, bandwidths, intensities and their temporal trajectories. Two methods are explored for vocal tract (formant) mapping. The first method is based on nonuniform frequency warping and the second is based on pole rotation. Both methods transform all parameters of the formants (frequency, bandwidth and intensity). In addition, the factors that affect the selection of the warping ratios for the mapping functions are presented. Experimental evaluation of voice morphing based on parametric models are presented.

Keywords

frequency estimation; prediction theory; signal representation; spectral analysis; speech processing; speech synthesis; formant bandwidths; formant frequencies; formant intensities; formant mapping; linear prediction model coefficients; nonuniform frequency warping; parameter estimation; parameteric formant transformation; pole rotation; source speaker; target speaker; temporal trajectories; vocal tract parameter representation; voice conversion; voice morphing; voice transformation; warping ratios; Bandwidth; Broadcasting; Frequency; Hidden Markov models; Parametric statistics; Predictive models; Signal synthesis; Speech synthesis; Target tracking; Trajectory;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings. (ICASSP '03). 2003 IEEE International Conference on

ISSN

1520-6149

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7663-3

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICASSP.2003.1198883

Filename

1198883