Prosody Modification Using Allpass Residual of Speech Signals

In this paper, we attempt to signify the role of phase spectrum of speech signals in acquiring an accurate estimate of excitation source for prosody modification. The phase spectrum is parametrically modeled as the response of an allpass (AP) filter, and the filter coefficients are estimated by considering the linear prediction (LP) residual as the output of the AP filter. The resultant residual signal, namely AP residual, exhibits unambiguous peaks corresponding to epochs, which are chosen as pitch markers for prosody modification. This strategy efficiently removes ambiguities associated with pitch marking, required for pitch synchronous overlap-add (PSOLA) method. The prosody modification using AP residual is advantageous than time domain PSOLA (TD-PSOLA) using speech signals, as it offers fewer distortions due to its flat magnitude spectrum. Windowing centered around unambiguous peaks in AP residual is used for segmentation, followed by pitch/duration modification of AP residual by mapping of pitch markers. The modified speech signal is obtained from modified AP residual using synthesis filters. The mean opinion scores are used for performance evaluation of the proposed method, and it is observed that the AP residual-based method delivers equivalent performance as that of LP residualbased method using epochs, and better performance than the linear prediction PSOLA (LP-PSOLA).