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Vowel-Based Voice Conversion and Its Application to Singing-Voice Manipulation

A novel and light-weight voice conversion method is applied to manipulate a singer's identity and singing style in realtime. The proposed method is based on a non-linear spectral morphing method that uses proximity information for vowel templates of the source and the target singing materials. The proposed method is based on the STRAIGHT speech analysis, modification and resynthesis system, and it yields highly natural manipulated sounds. To deal with the difficulties in applying our vowel-based voice conversion method to singing voices, singular-value decomposition and robust statistical measures are introduced to handle the huge variability of vowel spectra and fundamental frequencies in singing voices. Distance measures for preparing vowel templates and calculating proximity information are designed based on a psychophysical frequency scale, the equivalent rectangular band, ERB_N rate.

Authors: Yoshida, Yuri; Nisimura, Ryuichi; Irino, Toshio; Kawahara, Hideki
Affiliation: Wakayama University, Wakayama City, Japan
AES Conference:35th International Conference: Audio for Games (February 2009)
Paper Number:6 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Audio for Games: Speech Processing and Analysis

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