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KMID : 1022420170090010041
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Phonetics and Speech Sciences
2017 Volume.9 No. 1 p.41 ~ p.47
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Voice transformation for HTS using correlation between fundamental frequency and vocal tract length
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Yoo Hyo-Geun
Kim Young-Gwan
Suh Young-Joo
Kim Hoi-Rin
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Abstract
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The main advantage of the statistical parametric speech synthesis is its flexibility in changing voice characteristics. A personalized text-to-speech(TTS) system can be implemented by combining a speech synthesis system and a voice transformation system, and it is widely used in many application areas. It is known that the fundamental frequency and the spectral envelope of speech signal can be independently modified to convert the voice characteristics. Also it is important to maintain naturalness of the transformed speech. In this paper, a speech synthesis system based on Hidden Markov Model(HMM-based speech synthesis, HTS) using the STRAIGHT vocoder is constructed and voice transformation is conducted by modifying the fundamental frequency and spectral envelope. The fundamental frequency is transformed in a scaling method, and the spectral envelope is transformed through frequency warping method to control the speaker's vocal tract length. In particular, this study proposes a voice transformation method using the correlation between fundamental frequency and vocal tract length. Subjective evaluations were conducted to assess preference and mean opinion scores(MOS) for naturalness of synthetic speech. Experimental results showed that the proposed voice transformation method achieved higher preference than baseline systems while maintaining the naturalness of the speech quality.
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KEYWORD
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voice transformation , HMM-based speech synthesis , STRAIGHT vocoder , fundamental frequency , vocal tract length
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