Foreign accent conversion through voice morphing

Abstract

We present a voice morphing strategy that can be used to generate a continuum of accent transformations between a foreign speaker and a native speaker. The approach performs a cepstral decomposition of speech into spectral slope and spectral detail. Accent conversions are then generated by combining the spectral slope of the foreign speaker with a morph of the spectral detail of the native speaker. Spectral morphing is achieved by representing the spectral detail through pulse density modulation and averaging pulses in a pair-wise fashion. The technique is evaluated on parallel recordings from two ARCTIC speakers using objective measures of acoustic quality, speaker identity and foreign accent that have been recently shown to correlate with perceptual results from listening tests. Index Terms: voice morphing, accent conversion.