Generating expressive synthetic voices requires carefully designed databases that contain sufficient amount of expressive speech material. This paper investigates voice conversion and modification techniques to reduce database collection and processing efforts while maintaining acceptable quality and naturalness. In a factorial design, we study the relative contributions of voice quality and prosody as well as the [...]

Most existing voice conversion systems, particularly those based on Gaussian mixture models, require a set of paired acoustic vectors from the source and target speakers to learn their corresponding transformation function. The alignment of phonetically equivalent source and target vectors is not problematic when the training corpus is parallel, which means that both speakers utter [...]

Voice conversion can be formulated as finding a mapping function which transforms the features of the source speaker to those of the target speaker. Gaussian mixture model (GMM)-based conversion is commonly used, but it is subject to overfitting. In this paper, we propose to use partial least squares (PLS)-based transforms in voice conversion. To prevent [...]