The perceptual quality of VoIP conversations depends tightly on the pattern of packet losses, i.e., the distribution and duration of packet loss runs. The wider (resp. smaller) the inter-loss gap (resp. loss gap) duration, the lower is the quality degradation. Moreover, a set of speech sequences impaired using an identical packet loss pattern results in a different degree of perceptual quality ...

Concatenative speech synthesis is a method that can make speech sound which has naturalness and high-individuality of a speaker by introducing a large speech corpus. Based on this method, in this paper, we propose a voice conversion method whose conversion speech has high-individuality and naturalness. The authors also have two subjective evaluation experiments for evaluating individuality and ...

Power quality monitoring has advanced to an important tool for system evaluation. The increased amount of recorded data requires more sophisticated analysis methods. The paper describes the development and operation of a system for automated classification of power quality events. Different to existing approaches the proposed system introduces a new frame-based event model similar to speech mod...

The development of instrumental measures that do not only estimate the speech quality of modern telecommunication systems but also analyze it is a current issue in speech processing. Our work aims at an analytic quality measure for telephone-band speech that is based on the instrumental assessment of so-called quality dimensions. They describe different quality-relevant characteristics of speec...

This brief report discusses the affect of digital noise reduction (DNR) processing on aided speech recognition and sound quality measures in 14 adults fitted with a commercial hearing aid. Measures of speech recognition and sound quality were obtained in two different speech-in-noise conditions (71 dBA speech, +6 dB SNR and 75 dBA speech, +1 dB SNR). The results revealed that the presence or ab...

To construct a natural singing-voice synthesis system, it is important to adequately control acoustic features such as fundamental frequency (F0), spectrum shapes, and phoneme duration in the synthesis method. This paper reveals acoustic features affecting singing-voice perception by comparative analyzing singingand speaking-voices, and then proposes a transforming method from speaking-voice in...

Naturalness of sound quality is essential for singing-voice synthesis. Since 95% of singing is voiced sound (Cook, 1990), the focus of this paper is to improve the naturalness of the vowel tone quality via glottal excitation modeling. We propose to use the LF-model (Fant et al., 1985) for the glottal wave shape in conjunction with pitch-synchronous, amplitude-modulated Gaussian noise, which add...

In pitch synchronous speech synthesis the analysis/synthesis of the speech is done at each glottal closure instant (GCI). The errors in estimation of GCI's affect the quality of the synthesized speech. The effect of random perturbations in the GCI's, obtained from the speech and from glottal signal from an impedance electroglottograph using Childers and Hu's algorithm on the quality of speech s...