Voice conversion methods for vocal tract and pitch contour modification

This study proposes two new methods for detailed modeling and transformation of the vocal tract spectrum and the pitch contour. The first method (selective pre-emphasis) relies on band-pass filtering to perform vocal tract transformation. The second method (segmental pitch contour model) focuses on a more detailed modeling of pitch contours. Both methods are utilized in the design of a voice conversion algorithm based on codebook mapping. We compare them with existing vocal tract and pitch contour transformation methods and acoustic feature transplantations in subjective tests. The performance of the selective pre-emphasis based method is similar to the methods used in our previous work at higher sampling rates with a lower prediction order. The results also indicate that the segmental pitch contour model improves voice conversion performance.