Pitch transposition and breathiness modification using a glottal source model and its adapted vocal-tract filter

The transformation of the voiced segments of a speech recording has many applications such as expressivity synthesis or voice conversion. This paper addresses the pitch transposition and the modification of breathiness by means of an analytic description of the deterministic component of the voice source, a glottal model. Whereas this model is dedicated to voice production, most of the current methods can be applied to any pseudo-periodic signals. Using the described method, the synthesized voice is thus expected to better preserve some naturalness compared to a more generic method. Using preference tests, it is shown that this method is preferred for important pitch transposition (e.g. one octave) compared to two state of the art methods. Additionally, it is shown that the breathiness of two male utterances can be controlled.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Gilles Degottex, Axel Röbel, Xavier Rodet
• Keywords: ICASSP 2011, Important Pitch Transposition, Pitch Transposition, Signal Processing, Voiced Segments