This study focuses on the question of voice disguise and the problem of its detection. The voice disguise is considered as a deliberated action of the speaker who wants to falsify or to conceal his identity. Lots of possibilities are offered to a speaker to change his voice and to false a human ear or an automatic system. He could transform his voice by electronic scrambling or more simply by e...

This paper introduces speaker adaptive training techniques to tensor-based arbitrary speaker conversion. In voice conversion studies, realization of conversion from/to an arbitrary speaker’s voice is one of the important objectives. For this purpose, eigenvoice conversion (EVC), which is based on an eigenvoice Gaussian mixture model (EV-GMM), was proposed. Although the EVC can effectively const...

This paper introduces speaker adaptive training techniques to tensor-based arbitrary speaker conversion. In voice conversion studies, realization of conversion from/to an arbitrary speaker’s voice is one of the important objectives. For this purpose, eigenvoice conversion (EVC), which is based on an eigenvoice Gaussian mixture model (EV-GMM), was proposed. Although the EVC can effectively const...

We have so far proposed a speaking-aid system for laryngectomees using a statistical voice conversion technique. In the proposed system, artificial speech articulated with extremely small sound source signals is detected with a Non-Audible Murmur (NAM)microphone, and then, the detected artificial speech is converted into more natural voice in a probabilistic manner. Although this system basical...

Voice conversion refers to the adaptation of the characteristics of a source speaker's voice to those of a target speaker. Gaussian mixture models (GMM) have been found to be efficient in the voice conversion task. The GMM parameters are estimated from a training set with the goal to minimize the mean squared error (MSE) between the transformed and target vectors. Obviously, the quality of the ...

Spoken language conversion is the challenge of using synthesis systems to generate utterances in the voice of a speaker but in a language unknown to the speaker. Previous approaches have been based on voice conversion and voice adaptation technologies applied to the output of a foreign language TTS system. This inevitably reduces the quality and intelligibility of the output, since the source s...

A vocal conversion system that can synthesize a singing voice given a speaking voice and a musical score is proposed. It is based on the speech manipulation system STRAIGHT [1], and comprises three models controlling three acoustic features unique to singing voices: the F0, duration, and spectral envelope. Given the musical score and its tempo, the F0 control model generates the F0 contour of t...

This paper reviews our proposed approach to voice conversion (VC) and voice quality control based on an eigenvoice technique. VC is a technique to modify nonlinguistic information such as speaker individuality while keeping linguistic information unchanged. In the traditional VC framework, a conversion model for a source and target speaker-pair needs to be trained in advance using a parallel da...

The perceived age of a singing voice is the age of the singer as perceived by the listener, and is one of the notable characteristics that determines perceptions of a song. In this paper, we describe an investigation of acoustic features that have an effect on the perceived age, and a novel voice timbre control technique based on the perceived age for singing voice conversion (SVC). Singers can...