GMM based Nonlinear Transformation Methods for Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) is a technique for modifying the speech signal of a source speaker so that it sounds as if it is spoken by a target speaker. Most previous VC approaches used a linear transformation function based on GMM to convert the source spectral envelope to the target spectral envelope. In this paper, we propose several nonlinear GMM-based transformation functions in an attempt to deal with the over-smoothing effect of linear transformation. In order to obtain high-quality modifications of speech signals our VC system is implemented using the Harmonic plus Noise Model (HNM)analysis/synthesis framework. Experimental results are reported on the English corpus, MOCHA-TlMlT.