Pleasant singing voice is often ornamented by vibrato. This pitch fluctuation acts as a distinctive feature for singing and promotes voice quality. Nevertheless, independent pitch processing in singing voice synthesis does not guarantee the output quality. The spectral envelope actually varies with pitch during human voice production. This paper proposes a modeling technique for singers’ vibrat...

Blind voice separation refers to retrieve a set of independent sources combined by an unknown destructive system. The proposed separation procedure is based on processing of the observed sources without having any information about the combinational model or statistics of the source signals. Also, the number of combined sources is usually predefined and it is difficult to estimate based on the ...

BACKGROUND One of the most common symptoms of speech deficits in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) is significantly reduced vocal loudness and pitch range. The present study investigated whether abnormal vocalizations in individuals with PD are related to sensory processing of voice auditory feedback. Perturbations in loudness or pitch of voice auditory feedback are known to elicit shor...

Studies in sleeping newborns and infants propose that the superior temporal sulcus is involved in speech processing soon after birth. Speech processing also implicitly requires the analysis of the human voice, which conveys both linguistic and extra-linguistic information. However, due to technical and practical challenges when neuroimaging young children, evidence of neural correlates of speec...

The role of visual information in auditory processing was explored using a cross-modal priming task where listeners identified the gender of male and female voice samples after being primed with a same gender face. The faces were previously rated as either attractive or unattractive. A facilitative effect was found for female voices, but not males.

Voice quality is currently a key issue in speech synthesis research. The lack of realistic intra-speaker voice quality variation is an important source of concern for concatenation-based synthesis methods. A challenging problem is to reproduce the voice quality changes that are occuring in natural speech when the vocal e ort is varying. A new method for voice quality modi cation is presented. I...

Two speech processing systems have been developed for realtime and non-real-time voice conversion. Using the real-time processing the user can apply conversion during voice over IP (VoIP) calls imitating identity of a specified target speaker. Non-real-time processing system converts prerecorded audio books read by a professional reader imitating voice of the user. Both systems require some spe...