Paper Archive

IRCAM has a long experience in analysis, synthesis and transformation of voice. Natural voice transformations are of great interest for many applications and can be combine with text-to-speech system, leading to a powerful creation tool. We present research conducted at IRCAM on voice transformations for the last few years. Transformations can be achieved in a global way by modifying pitch, spectral envelope, durations etc. While it sacrifices the possibility to attain a specific target voice, the approach allows the production of new voices of a high degree of naturalness with different gender and age, modified vocal quality, or another speech style. These transformations can be applied in realtime using ircamTools TR A X.Transformation can also be done in a more specific way in order to transform a voice towards the voice of a target speaker. Finally, we present some recent research on the transformation of expressivity.

Download

A new estimation technique is proposed which computes the control parameters of a physical model of a trumpet in order to simulate a recording of a real instrument. First, the physical constraints of the instrument and the prior knowledge about how a player controls a trumpet are described. This is taken into account during the design of the data set and guarantees that these constraints are respected. Then, an estimation procedure minimizes two perceptual similarity criteria in function of the control parameters. The first criterium expresses the difference of the spectral envelopes and the second one the difference in fundamental frequency. An optimization technique is proposed that yields an optimal solution for the fundamental frequency, and a conditional suboptimal solution for the spectral envelope. A robust implementation of the technique was developed for which it is shown that the estimated parameters are unique and that the optimization does not suffer from local minima.

Download