APPLYING IMPROVED SPECTRAL MODELING FOR HIGH QUALITY VOICE CONVERSION

In this work, accurate spectral envelope estimation is applied to Voice Conversion in order to achieve High-Quality timbre conver-sion. True-Envelope based estimators allow model order selection leading to an adaptation of the spectral features to the characteris-tics of the speaker. Optimal residual signals can also be computed following a local adaptation of the model order in terms of the F0. A new perceptual criteria is proposed to measure the impact of the spectral conversion error. The proposed envelope models show improved spectral conversion performance as well as increased converted-speech quality when compared to Linear Prediction. Index Terms Speech synthesis, speech analysis, cepstral analysis, spectral analysis, linear predictive coding