Speaker Transformation Algorithm Using Segmental Codebooks (stasc) X

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 characteristics are mapped to target speaker acoustic characteristics. The acoustic parameters included in the mapping are vocal tract, excitation, intonation, energy, and duration characteristics. Informal listening tests suggest that convincing voice conversion is achieved while maintaining high speech quality. The performance of the proposed system is also evaluated on a simple Gaussian mixture model based speaker identiication system, and the results show that the transformed speech is assigned higher likelihood by the target speaker model when compared to the source speaker model. z Permission is hereby granted to publish this abstract separately.