Abstract
Voice morphing is the process of producing intermediate or hybrid voices between the utterances of two speakers. It can also be defined as the process of gradually transforming the voice of one speaker to that of another. The ability to change the speaker's individual characteristics and to produce high-quality voices can be used in many applications. Examples include multimedia and video entertainment, as well as enrichment of speech databases in text-to-speech systems. In this study we present a new technique which enables production of a given number of intermediate voices or of utterances which gradually change from one voice to another. This technique is based on two components: (1) creation of a 3D prototype waveform interpolation (PWI) surface from the LPC residual signal, to produce an intermediate excitation signal; (2) a representation of the vocal tract by a lossless tube area function, and an interpolation of the parameters of the two speakers. The resulting synthesized signal sounds like a natural voice lying between the two original voices.
Highlights
Voice morphing is the process of producing intermediate or hybrid voices between the utterances of two speakers
The algorithm is based on representing the residual error signal as a prototype waveform interpolation (PWI) surface, and the vocal tract as a lossless tube area function
The PWI surface incorporates the characteristics of the excitation signal, and enables reproduction of a residual signal with a given pitch contour and time duration, which includes the dynamics of both speakers’ excitations
Summary
Voice morphing is the process of producing intermediate or hybrid voices between the utterances of two speakers. In this study we present a new technique which enables the production of a desired number of intermediate voices between the original voices of two speakers, or the production of one voice signal that changes gradually in time from one speaker to another The latter means that, at the beginning of the utterance, the voice characteristics are those of one speaker, and the voice is perceived as belonging to that speaker. Voice conversion modifies the utterances of one speaker so that his/her voice will sound like another (target) voice, by matching the source voice to the statistical properties of the target voice In these studies, different methods are used to represent the relationships between the source and the target speakers, and most of the studies are concentrated on the spectral envelope data of short segments of speech. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the algorithm in contrast to previous studies
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