Absract--Voice conversion involves transformation of speaker characteristics in a speech uttered by a speaker called source speaker to generate a speech having voice characteristics of a desired speaker called the target speaker. Voice conversion is used in many applications namely dubbing, to enhance the quality of the speech, text-to-speech synthesizers, online games, multimedia, music, cross...

This paper describes a voice characteristics conversion technique for an HMM-based text-to-speech synthesis system. The system uses phoneme HMMs as the speech synthesis units, and voice characteristics conversion is achieved by changing HMM parameters appropriately. To transform the voice characteristics of synthetic speech to the target speaker, we apply an MLLR (Maximum Likelihood Linear Regr...

This paper describes a voice conversion system based on parameter transformation [1]. Voice conversion is the process of making one person’s voice “source” sound like another person’s voice “target”[2]. We will present a voice conversion scheme consisting of three stages. First an analysis is performed on the natural speech to obtain the acoustical parameters. These parameters will be voiced an...

In the present work, we introduce a new performance evaluation measure for assessing the capacity of voice conversion systems to modify the speech of one speaker (source) so that it sounds as if it was uttered by another speaker (target). This measure relies on a GMM-UBM-based likelihood estimator that estimates the degree of proximity between an utterance of the converted voice and the predefi...

A subtask of voice conversion is to accurately map the pitch contour of a source speaker to a target speaker. So far, the most widely employed method for carrying out this mapping is based on adjusting the pitch range of the source speaker to match the target while keeping the shape of the contour unchanged. In this project, we investigate four alternative algorithms for pitch contour mapping a...

This paper presents a new voice conversion method called Weighted Frequency Warping (WFW), which combines the well known GMM approach and the frequency warping approach. The harmonic plus stochastic model has been used to analyze, modify and synthesize the speech signal. Special phase manipulation procedures have been designed to allow the system to work in pitch-asynchronous mode. The experime...

The human auditory system is able to distinguish the vocal source of thousands of speakers, yet not much is known about what features the auditory system uses to do this. Fourier Transforms are capable of capturing the pitch and harmonic structure of the speaker but this alone proves insufficient at identifying speakers uniquely. The remaining structure, often referred to as timbre, is critical...

Voice conversion, as considered in this paper, is defined as modifying the speech signal of one speaker (source speaker) so that it sounds as if it had been pronounced by a different speaker (target speaker). Our contribution includes the design of a new methodology for representing the relationship between two sets of spectral envelopes. The proposed method is based on the use of a Gaussian mi...

This paper describes an approach to the challenging problem of text and speaker independent voice conversion. The approach is based on target speaker’s speech production process parameterization using harmonic analysis. Unified model allows processing of any input speech regardless of its content and source speaker. The method provides subjective quality of conversion that is comparable with te...

This paper explores the benefits of transforming spectral peaks in voice conversion. First, in examining classic GMMbased transformation with cepstral coefficients, we show that the lack of transformed data variance ("over-smoothing") can be related to the choice of spectral parameterization. Consequently, we propose an alternative parameterization using spectral peaks. The peaks are transforme...