Emotional voice conversion: Theory, databases and ESD

In this paper, we first provide a review of the state-of-the-art emotional voice conversion research, and existing speech databases. We then motivate development novel database (ESD) that addresses increasing research need. With ESD database1 is now made available to community. The consists 350 parallel utterances spoken by 10 native English Chinese speakers covers 5 emotion categories (neutral, happy, angry, sad surprise). More than 29 h data were recorded in controlled acoustic environment. suitable for multi-speaker cross-lingual studies. As case studies, implement several systems on database. This paper provides reference study conjunction with its release.