14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Talker Transformation Through Synthesis

Richard S. McGowan (1), Helen M. Hanson (1,2), Kenneth N. Stevens (1,2), David W. Gow (2,3,4)

(1) Sensimetrics Corporation, Somerville, MA, USA
(2) Research Laboratory of Electronics and E.E.C.S., MIT, USA
(3) Department of Psychology, Salem State College, USA
(4) Massachusetts General Hospital, USA

These experiments explore rules for transforming the speech of one talker so that it sounds like the speech of another talker. Acoustic descriptors were measured from ten short sentences spoken by two male and two female talkers. These descriptors were used to derive rules for transformations of the speech between two talkers of the same gender. One of the short sentences was chosen for copy-synthesis of these talkers, and the transformations were applied to these copy-syntheses. Listening tests were used to test the effectiveness of these transformations in changing the identity of the talkers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  McGowan, Richard S. / Hanson, Helen M. / Stevens, Kenneth N. / Gow, David W. (1999): "Talker transformation through synthesis", In ICPhS-14, 137-140.