Voice Personality Transformation Using a Probabilistic Method
Ki-Seung Lee · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea · 2005
This paper addresses a voice personality transformation algorithm which makes one person's voices sound as if another person's voices. In the proposed method, one person's voices are represented by LPC cepstrum, pitch period and speaking rate, the appropriate transformation rules for each Parameter are constructed. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is used to model one speaker's LPC cepstrums and conditional probability is used to model the relationship between two speaker's LPC cepstrums. To obtain the parameters representing each probabilistic model. a Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation method is employed. The transformed LPC cepstrums are obtained by using a Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) criterion. Pitch period and speaking rate are used as the parameters for prosody transformation, which is implemented by using the ratio of the average values. The proposed method reveals the superior performance to the previous VQ-based method in subjective measures including average cepstrum distance reduction ratio and likelihood increasing ratio. In subjective test. we obtained almost the same correct identification ratio as the previous method and we also confirmed that high qualify transformed speech is obtained, which is due to the smoothly evolving spectral contours over time.