CONSIDERATIONS IN VOICE TRANSFORMATION WITH PHYSIOLOGICAL SCALING PRINCIPLES

This study begins to explore the importance of the physiological domai n in voice transformation. A general approach is outlined for transfor ming the voice quality of sentence-level speech while maintaining the same phonetic content. Transformations will eventually include gender, age, voice quality, emotional state, disordered state, dialect or imp ersonation. In this paper, only a specific voice quality, twang, is de scribed as an example. The basic question is: relative to pure signal processing, can voices be transformed more effectively if biomechanica l, acoustic and anatomical scaling principles are applied? At present, two approaches are contrasted, a Linear Predictive Coding approach an d a biomechanical simulation approach. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.