• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 1994.06a
• /
• pp.893-898
• /
• 1994

In this paper, the influence of voice source estimation and modeling on speech synthesis and coding is examined and then their new estimation and modeling techniques are proposed and verified by computer simulation. It is known that the existing speech synthesizer produced the speech which is dull and inanimated. These problems are arised from the fact that existing estimation and modeling techniques can not give more accurate voice parameters. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new voice source estimation algorithm and modeling techniques which can not give more accurate voice parameters. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new voice source estimation algorithm and modeling techniques which can represent a variety of source characteristics. First, we divide speech samples in one pitch region into four parts having different characteristics. Second, the vocal-tract parameters and voice source waveforms are estimated in each regions differently using sequential SVD. Third, we propose composite source model as a new voice source model which is represented by weighted sum of pre-defined basis functions. And finally, the weights and time-shift parameters of the proposed composite source model are estimeted uning EM(estimate maximize) algorithm. Experimental results indicate that the proposed estimation and modeling methods can estimate more accurate voice source waveforms and represent various source characteristics.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
• /
• 1998.10a
• /
• pp.1247-1250
• /
• 1998

In speech synthesis, LF model is widely used for excitation signal for voice source coding system. But LF model does not represent the harmonic frequencies of excitation signal. We propose an effective method which use sinusoidal functions for representing the harmonics of voice source signal. The proposed method could achieve more exact voice source waveform and better synthesized speech quality than LF model.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3
• /
• pp.132-147
• /
• 1998

Previously developed methods for pitch modification have not been based on the voice source model. Therefore, the synthesized speech often sounds unnatural although it may be highly intelligible. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the alteration of a voice source signal with pitch period and to establish the pitch-modification rule based on the result of this analysis. We examine the alteration of the interval of closing phase, closed phase and open phase using the excitation waveform as the pitch increases. In comparison to the previous methods which performed directly on the speech signal, the pitch modification method based on a voice source model shows high intelligibility and naturalness. This study might benefit the application to the speaker identification and the voice color conversion. Therefore the proposed method will provide high quality synthetic speech.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.3 no.2
• /
• pp.89-96
• /
• 2011

In this paper, details of the design and implementation of a voice source simulator using Simulink and Matlab are discussed. This simulator is an implementation by model-based design concept. Voice sources can be analyzed and manipulated through various factors by choosing options from GUI input and selecting pre-defined blocks or user created ones. This kind of simulation tool can simplify the procedure of analyzing speech signals for various purposes such as voice quality analysis, pathological voice analysis, and speech coding. Also, basic analysis functions are supported to compare the original signal and the manipulated ones.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
• /
• v.8 no.4
• /
• pp.89-95
• /
• 2016

The purpose of this work is to analyze and synthesize the pseudo-periodicity of voice using a source model. A speech signal has periodic characteristics; however, it is not completely periodic. While periodicity contributes significantly to the production of prosody, emotional status, etc., pseudo-periodicity contributes to the distinctions between normal and abnormal status, the naturalness of normal speech, etc. Measurement of pseudo-periodicity is typically performed through parameters such as jitter and shimmer. For studying the pseudo-periodic nature of voice in a controlled environment, through collected natural voice, we can only observe the distributions of the parameters, which are limited by the size of collected data. If we can generate voice samples in a controlled manner, experiments that are more diverse can be conducted. In this study, the probability distributions of vowel pitch variation are obtained from the speech signal. Based on the probability distribution of vocal folds, pulses with a designated jitter value are synthesized. Then, the target and re-analyzed jitter values are compared to check the validity of the method. It was found that the jitter synthesis method is useful for normal voice synthesis.

• Speech Sciences
• /
• v.2
• /
• pp.25-44
• /
• 1997

When listening the various speech synthesis systems developed and being used in our country, we find that though the quality of these systems has improved, they lack naturalness. Moreover, since the voice color of these systems are limited to only one recorded speech DB, it is necessary to record another speech DB to create different voice colors. 'Voice Color' is an abstract concept that characterizes voice personality. So speech synthesis systems need a voice color control function to create various voices. The aim of this study is to examine several factors of voice color control rules for the text-to-speech system which makes natural and various voice types for the sounding of synthetic speech. In order to find such rules from natural speech, glottal source parameters and frequency characteristics of the vocal tract for several voice colors have been studied. In this paper voice colors were catalogued as: deep, sonorous, thick, soft, harsh, high tone, shrill, and weak. For the voice source model, the LF-model was used and for the frequency characteristics of vocal tract, the formant frequencies, bandwidths, and amplitudes were used. These acoustic parameters were tested through multiple regression analysis to achieve the general relation between these parameters and voice colors.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
• /
• 1998.06c
• /
• pp.171-174
• /
• 1998

본 논문에서는 음성합성(speech synthesis) 및 부호화(coding) 시스템에 있어서 음원(voice source) 모델링에 관한 문제를 살펴보고자 한다. 기존의 음원 모델링 시스템이 가지고 있는 여러 문제들을 극복하고자 기저함수(basis function) 의 가중 합(weighted-sum)으로 음원을 모델링 하는 새로운 기법을 제안하고자 한다. 제안한 방법에서는 음원 파형(voice source waveform)을 적절히 표현하기 위해서 필터뱅크(filter bank)에 기초한 기저함수의 가중 합으로 나타낸다. 다양한 음원 특성을 효과적으로 나타내는 음원 파라미터를 구하기 위하여 EM(estimate maximize)에 기초한 구조에 관해 조사한다. 제안한 방법을 이용하여 다양한 유성음에 대해 실험을 수행하였다. 실험결과 제안한 추정(estimation) 방법 및 모델링 방법을 이용하면 기존의 방법에 비해 더 정확한 음원 파형을 추정할 수 있고, 다양한 음원 특성을 나타낼 수 있다. 또한 음성합성 및 부호화에서도 음성품질(voice quality)를 개선시킬 수 있으리라 기대된다.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
• /
• 2005.11a
• /
• pp.67-70
• /
• 2005

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.

• MALSORI
• /
• no.67
• /
• pp.167-180
• /
• 2008

This paper describes a novel spectral envelope conversion method based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM). The core of this paper is rearranging source feature vectors in input space to the transformed feature vectors in feature space for the better modeling of GMM of source and target features. The quality of statistical modeling is dependent on the distribution and the dimension of data. The proposed method transforms both of the distribution and dimension of data and gives us the chance to model the same data with different configuration. Because the converted feature vectors should be on the input space, only source feature vectors are rearranged in the feature space and target feature vectors remain unchanged for the joint pdf of source and target features using KPCA. The experimental result shows that the proposed method outperforms the conventional GMM-based conversion method in various training environment.

• ETRI Journal
• /
• v.35 no.3
• /
• pp.542-545
• /
• 2013

State-of-the-art voice codecs have been developed to extend the input bandwidth to enhance quality while maintaining interoperability with a legacy codec. Most of them employ a modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) for coding their extended band. We propose a source filter model-based coding algorithm of MDCT spectral coefficients, apply it to the ITU-T G.711.1 super wideband (SWB) extension codec, and subjectively test it to validate the model. A subjective test shows a better quality over the standardized SWB codec.