%Aigaion2 BibTeX export from Idiap Publications %Thursday 21 November 2024 04:46:59 PM @TECHREPORT{Saheer_Idiap-RR-31-2015, author = {Saheer, Lakshmi and Na, Xingyu and Cernak, Milos}, projects = {Idiap, DBOX}, month = {10}, title = {Syllabic Pitch Tuning for Neutral-to-Emotional Voice Conversion}, type = {Idiap-RR}, number = {Idiap-RR-31-2015}, year = {2015}, institution = {Idiap}, abstract = {Prosody plays an important role in both identification and synthesis of emotionalized speech. Prosodic features like pitch are usually estimated and altered at a segmental level based on short windows of speech (where the signal is expected to be quasi-stationary). This results in a frame-wise change of acoustical parameters for synthesizing emotionalized speech. In order to convert a neutral speech to an emotional speech from the same user, it might be better to alter the pitch parameters at the suprasegmental level like at the syllable-level since the changes in the signal are more subtle and smooth. In this paper we aim to show that the pitch transformation in a neutral-to-emotional voice conversion system may result in a better speech quality output if the transformations are performed at the supra-segmental (syllable) level rather than a frame-level change. Subjective evaluation results are shown to demonstrate if the naturalness, speaker similarity and the emotion recognition tasks show any performance difference.}, pdf = {https://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/reports/2015/Saheer_Idiap-RR-31-2015.pdf} }