Dynamic prosody modification using zero frequency filtered signal

Abstract

Modifying the prosody parameters like pitch, duration and strength of excitation by desired factor is termed as prosody modification. The objective of this work is to develop a dynamic prosody modification method based on zero frequency filtered signal (ZFFS), a byproduct of zero frequency filtering (ZFF). The existing epoch based prosody modification techniques use epochs as pitch markers and the required prosody modification is achieved by the interpolation of epoch intervals plot. Alternatively, this work proposes a method for prosody modification by the resampling of ZFFS. Also the existing epoch based prosody modification method is further refined for modifying the prosodic parameters at every epoch level. Thus providing more flexibility for prosody modification. The general framework for deriving the modified epoch locations can also be used for obtaining the dynamic prosody modification from existing PSOLA and epoch based prosody modification methods. The quality of the prosody modified speech is evaluated using waveforms, spectrograms and subjective studies. The usefulness of the proposed dynamic prosody modification is demonstrated for neutral to emotional conversion task. The subjective evaluations performed for the emotion conversion indicate the effectiveness of the dynamic prosody modification over the fixed prosody modification for emotion conversion. The dynamic prosody modified speech files synthesized using the proposed, epoch based and TD-PSOLA methods are available at http://www.iitg.ac.in/eee/emstlab/demos/demo5.php .