This paper presents the NU-NAIST voice conversion (VC) system for the Voice Conversion Challenge 2016 (VCC 2016) developed by a joint team of Nagoya University and Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Statistical VC based on a Gaussian mixture model makes it possible to convert speaker identity of a source speaker’ voice into that of a target speaker by converting several speech parameters...

A novel tone quality improvement method for a bone conduction voice is presented. In the present method, the tone quality of the bone conduction voice is converted to the similar quality of the air conduction voice. For the voice conversion, the present method uses a codebook, which consists of various paired code vectors of the bone and air conduction voices. The deltaand mel-cepstral coeffici...

A speaker verification system automatically accepts or rejects a claimed identity of a speaker based on a speech sample. Recently, a major progress was made in speaker verification which leads to mass market adoption, such as in smartphone and in online commerce for user authentication. A major concern when deploying speaker verification technology is whether a system is robust against spoofing...

In voice conversion, speech and signal processing techniques are used for the modification of speaker identity, i.e. for modifying the speech of a source speaker to sound as if it was spoken by a target speaker. In this paper, we describe a parametric framework for voice conversion. The parametric representation separates the speech signal into a vocal tract contribution estimated using linear ...

Cross-language voice conversion maps the speech of speaker S1 in language L1 to the voice of speaker S2 using knowledge only of how S2 speaks a different language L2. This mapping is usually performed using speech material from S1 and S2 that has been deemed “equivalent” in either acoustic or phonetic terms. This study investigates the issue of equivalence in more detail, and contrasts the perf...

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 ...

Voice conversion (VC) is a technique for converting a source speaker’s voice into another speaker’s voice without changing linguistic information. As a typical approach to VC, a statistical method based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used widely. A GMM is trained as a conversion model using a parallel data set composed of many utterance-pairs of source and target speakers. Although this fra...