6,587 research outputs found
Wavelet-based voice morphing
This paper presents a new multi-scale voice morphing algorithm. This algorithm enables a user to transform one person's speech pattern into another person's pattern with distinct characteristics, giving it a new identity, while preserving the original content. The voice morphing algorithm performs the morphing at different subbands by using the theory of wavelets and models the spectral conversion using the theory of Radial Basis Function Neural Networks. The results obtained on the TIMIT speech database demonstrate effective transformation of the speaker identity
Research methods and intelligibility studies
This paper first briefly reviews the concept of intelligibility as it has been employed in both English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and world Englishes (WE) research. It then examines the findings of the Lingua Franca Core (LFC), a list of phonological features that empirical research has shown to be important for safeguarding mutual intelligibility between non-native speakers of English. The main point of the paper is to analyse these findings and demonstrate that many of them can be explained if three perspectives (linguistic, psycholinguistic and historical-variationist) are taken. This demonstration aims to increase the explanatory power of the concept of intelligibility by providing some theoretical background. An implication for ELF research is that at the phonological level, internationally intelligible speakers have a large number of features in common, regardless of whether they are non-native speakers or native speakers. An implication for WE research is that taking a variety-based, rather than a features-based, view of phonological variation and its connection with intelligibility is likely to be unhelpful, as intelligibility depends to some extent on the phonological features of individual speakers, rather than on the varieties per se
Learning Repeatable Speech Embeddings Using An Intra-class Correlation Regularizer
A good supervised embedding for a specific machine learning task is only
sensitive to changes in the label of interest and is invariant to other
confounding factors. We leverage the concept of repeatability from measurement
theory to describe this property and propose to use the intra-class correlation
coefficient (ICC) to evaluate the repeatability of embeddings. We then propose
a novel regularizer, the ICC regularizer, as a complementary component for
contrastive losses to guide deep neural networks to produce embeddings with
higher repeatability. We use simulated data to explain why the ICC regularizer
works better on minimizing the intra-class variance than the contrastive loss
alone. We implement the ICC regularizer and apply it to three speech tasks:
speaker verification, voice style conversion, and a clinical application for
detecting dysphonic voice. The experimental results demonstrate that adding an
ICC regularizer can improve the repeatability of learned embeddings compared to
only using the contrastive loss; further, these embeddings lead to improved
performance in these downstream tasks.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202
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