Non-parametric techniques for pitch-scale and time-scale modification of speech

Abstract

Time-scale and, to a lesser extent, pitch-scale modifications of speech and audio signals are the subject of major theoretical and practical interest. Applications are numerous, including, to name but a few, text-to-speech synthesis (based on acoustical unit concatenation), transformation of voice characteristics, foreign language learning but also audio monitoring or film/soundtrack post-synchronization. To fulfill the need for high-quality time and pitch-scaling, a number of algorithms have been proposed recently, along with their real-time implementation, sometimes for very inexpensive hardware. It appears that most of these algorithms can be viewed as slight variations of a small number of basic schemes. This contribution reviews frequency-domain algorithms (phase-vocoder) and time-domain algorithms (Time-Domain Pitch-Synchronous Overlap/Add and the like) in the same framework. More recent variations of these schemes are also presented.