Rhythm-Flexible Voice Conversion without Parallel Data Using Cycle-GAN over Phoneme Posteriorgram Sequences

Speaking rate refers to the average number of phonemes within some unit time, while the rhythmic patterns refer to duration distributions for realizations of different phonemes within different phonetic structures. Both are key components of prosody in speech, which is different for different speakers. Models like cycle-consistent adversarial network (Cycle-GAN) and variational auto-encoder (VAE) have been successfully applied to voice conversion tasks without parallel data. However, due to the neural network architectures and feature vectors chosen for these approaches, the length of the predicted utterance has to be fixed to that of the input utterance, which limits the flexibility in mimicking the speaking rates and rhythmic patterns for the target speaker. On the other hand, sequence-to-sequence learning model was used to remove the above length constraint, but parallel training data are needed. In this paper, we propose an approach utilizing sequence-to-sequence model trained with unsupervised Cycle-GAN to perform the transformation between the phoneme posteriorgram sequences for different speakers. In this way, the length constraint mentioned above is removed to offer rhythm-flexible voice conversion without requiring parallel data. Preliminary evaluation on two datasets showed very encouraging results.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, Submitted to SLT 201

EVALUATION OF BREAST SUPPORTS WITH DIFFERENT BRAS DURING JUMPLANDING MANEUVERS

This study attempted to evaluate kinematic of the breast with different breast support during jump-landing maneuvers. Twelve C cup female volleyball athletes were recruited in this study. Markers were attached to the subject’s nipples and trunk to calculate relative 3D breast kinematics data. The subject had to wear four kinds of bras (no bra, normal bra, fashion bra, and sport bra) to evaluation of breast support in the medio-lateral, anterioposterior, and vertical directions. Results of current study showed that the sports bra was effective in reducing the amplitude of breast displacement, velocity, acceleration, and comfort scale during jump-landing than no bra situation, everyday bra, and fashion bra. Future studies should be focus on analyzing different types of sports bras in order to identify 3D breast kinematics with different bras during jump-landing maneuvers

ANALYSIS OF TRUNK ROTATION PATTERNS WHEN SWINGING AT DIFFERENT SPEEDS: A PILOT STUDY

As the trunk plays a vital role during the golf full swing, it is important to understand how body movements affect the golf swing. The purpose of this study was to determine how golfers increase club head speed through trunk rotation. Trunk rotation patterns were captured by 3D motion capture system at 250 Hz. To investigate the effective factors of increasing club head speed, we compared two situations, swing at normal club head speed and at accelerated club head speed, via the trunk rotation angles at three dimensions through six temporary events. The results showed that subtle differences between normal club head speed and accelerated club head speed. To increase club head speed, golfers might optimize the separation between shoulder and pelvic in the early downswing