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2012 Vol.31, Issue 1 Preview Page
Feature Selection-based Voice Transformation
Ki-Seung Lee1*
1Department of Electronic Engineering, Konkuk University
*Corresponding Author
31 January 2012. pp. 39-50
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Abstract

A voice transformation (VT) method that can make the utterance of a source speaker mimic that of a target speaker is described. Speaker individuality transformation is achieved by altering three feature parameters, which include the LPC cepstrum, pitch period and gain. The main objective of this study involves construction of an optimal sequence of features selected from a target speaker’s database, to maximize both the correlation probabilities between the transformed and the source features and the likelihood of the transformed features with respect to the target model. A set of two-pass conversion rules is proposed, where the feature parameters are first selected from a database then the optimal sequence of the feature parameters is then constructed in the second pass. The conversion rules were developed using a statistical approach that employed a maximum likelihood criterion. In constructing an optimal sequence of the features, a hidden Markov model (HMM) was employed to find the most likely combination of the features with respect to the target speaker’s model. The effectiveness of the proposed transformation method was evaluated using objective tests and informal listening tests. We confirmed that the proposed method leads to perceptually more preferred results, compared with the conventional methods.

Keywords
Voice conversion
Unit selection
Hidden markov model
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Information
  • Publisher :The Acoustical Society of Korea
  • Publisher(Ko) :한국음향학회
  • Journal Title :The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
  • Journal Title(Ko) :한국음향학회지
  • Volume : 31
  • No :1
  • Pages :39-50
  • Received Date : 2011-11-29
  • Accepted Date : 2011-12-23
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