Skip to content

Advertisement

EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing
EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing Cover Image
  • Research Article
  • Open Access

Perceptual Continuity and Naturalness of Expressive Strength in Singing Voices Based on Speech Morphing

  • 1, 2, 3Email author,
  • 4,
  • 1, 3,
  • 2, 1 and
  • 5
EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing20072007:023807

https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/23807

©  Tomoko Yonezawa et al. 2007

  • Received: 30 November 2006
  • Accepted: 17 August 2007
  • Published:

Abstract

This paper experimentally shows the importance of perceptual continuity of the expressive strength in vocal timbre for natural change in vocal expression. In order to synthesize various and continuous expressive strengths with vocal timbre, we investigated gradually changing expressions by applying the STRAIGHT speech morphing algorithm to singing voices. Here, a singing voice without expression is used as the base of morphing, and singing voices with three different expressions are used as the target. Through statistical analyses of perceptual evaluations, we confirmed that the proposed morphing algorithm provides perceptual continuity of vocal timbre. Our results showed the following: (i) gradual strengths in absolute evaluations, and (ii) a perceptually linear strength provided by the calculation of corrected intervals of the morph ratio by the inverse (reciprocal) function of an equation that approximates the perceptual strength. Finally, we concluded that applying continuity was highly effective for achieving perceptual naturalness, judging from the results showing that (iii) our gradual transformation method can perform well for perceived naturalness.

Keywords

  • Acoustics
  • Transformation Method
  • Absolute Evaluation
  • Natural Change
  • Gradual Transformation

[1234567891011121314151617]

Authors’ Affiliations

(1)
ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan
(2)
Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan
(3)
ATR Media Information Science Laboratories, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan
(4)
National Institute of Information and Communication Technology/ATR Cognitive Information Science Laboratories, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan
(5)
ATR Knowledge Science Laboratories, 2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto 619-0288, Japan

References

  1. Duffy BR: Anthropomorphism and the social robot. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 2003,42(3-4):177-190. 10.1016/S0921-8890(02)00374-3View ArticleMATHGoogle Scholar
  2. Minato T, MacDorman KF, Shimada M, Itakura S, Lee K, Ishiguro H: Evaluating humanlikeness by comparing responses elicited by an android and a person. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Man-Machine Symbiotic Systems, November 2004, Kyoto, Japan 373-383.Google Scholar
  3. Hanson D: Exploring the aesthetic range for humanoid robots. Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society in Cooperation with the 5th International Conference on Cognitive Science (CogSci/ICCS '06), July 2006, Vancouver, BC, Canada 16-20.Google Scholar
  4. Kawahara H, Matsui H: Auditory morphing based on an elastic perceptual distance metric in an interference-free time-frequency representation. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP '03), April 2003, Hong Kong 1: 256-259.View ArticleGoogle Scholar
  5. Kawahara H, Masuda-Kasuse I, Cheveigne A: Restructuring speech representations using a pitch-adaptive time-frequency smoothing and an instantaneous-frequency-based F0 extraction: possible role of a reptitive structure in sounds. Speech Communication 1999,27(3-4):187-207. 10.1016/S0167-6393(98)00085-5View ArticleGoogle Scholar
  6. Schröder M: Emotional speech synthesis: a review. Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech '01), September 2001, Aalborg, Denmark 1: 561-564.Google Scholar
  7. Erickson D: Expressive speech: production, perception and application to speech synthesis. Acoustical Science and Technology 2005,26(4):317-325. 10.1250/ast.26.317View ArticleGoogle Scholar
  8. Iida A, Iga S, Higuchi F, Campbell N, Yasumura M: A speech synthesis system with emotion for assisting communication. Proceedings of the ISCA Workshop on Speech and Emotion, September 2000, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK 167-172.Google Scholar
  9. Campbell N: Developments in corpus-based speech synthesis: approaching natural conversational speech. IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems 2005,E88-D(3):376-383. 10.1093/ietisy/e88-d.3.376View ArticleGoogle Scholar
  10. Saitou T, Unoki M, Akagi M: Development of an F0 control model based on F0 dynamic characteristics for singing-voice synthesis. Speech Communication 2005,46(3-4):405-417. 10.1016/j.specom.2005.01.010View ArticleGoogle Scholar
  11. Saitou T, Tsuji N, Unoki M, Akagi M: Analysis of acoustic features affecting "singing-ness" and its application to siging-voice synthesis from speaking-voice. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP '04), October 2004, Jeju, Korea 3: 1929-1932.Google Scholar
  12. Cano P, Loscos A, Bonada J, Boer M, Serra X: Voice morphing system for impersonating in karaoke applications. Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC '00), August 2000, Berlin, Germany 109-112.Google Scholar
  13. Sogabe Y, Kakehi K, Kawahara H: Psychological evaluation of emotional speech using a new morphing method. Proceedings of the 4th Joint International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS/ASCS '03), July 2003, Sydney, AustraliaGoogle Scholar
  14. Matsui H, Kawahara H: Investigation of emotionally morphed speech perception and its structure using a high quality speech manipulation system. Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech '03), September 2003, Geneva, Switzerland 2113-2116.Google Scholar
  15. Mareüil PB, Célérier P, Toen J: Generation of emotions by a morphing technique in English, French and Spanish. Proceedings of Speech Prosody, April 2002, Aix-en-Provence, France 187-190.Google Scholar
  16. Yonezawa T, Suzuki N, Mase K, Kogure K: Gradually changing expression of singing voice based on morphing. Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Interspeech '05), September 2005, Lisbon, Portugal 541-544.Google Scholar
  17. Yonezawa T, Suzuki N, Mase K, Kogure K: Handysinger: expressive singing voice morphing using personified hand-puppet interface. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME '05), May 2005, Vancouver, Canada 121-126.Google Scholar

Copyright

© Tomoko Yonezawa et al. 2007

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Advertisement