CAN VOICE CONVERSION BE USED TO REDUCE NON-NATIVE ACCENTS? Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Voice-conversion (VC) techniques aim to transform utterances from a source speaker to sound as if a target speaker had produced them. For this reason, VC is generally ill-suited for accent-conversion (AC) purposes, where the goal is to capture the regional accent of the source while preserving the voice quality of the target. In this paper, we propose a modification of the conventional training process for VC that allows it to perform as an AC transform. Namely, we pair source and target vectors based not on their ordering within a parallel corpus, as is commonly done in VC, but based on their linguistic similarity. We validate the approach on a corpus containing native-accented and Spanish-accented utterances, and compare it against conventional VC through a series of listening tests. We also analyze whether phonological differences between the two languages (Spanish and American English) help predict the performance of the two methods. 2014 IEEE.

name of conference

  • 2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)

published proceedings

  • 2014 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ACOUSTICS, SPEECH AND SIGNAL PROCESSING (ICASSP)

author list (cited authors)

  • Aryal, S., & Gutierrez-Osuna, R.

citation count

  • 18

complete list of authors

  • Aryal, Sandesh||Gutierrez-Osuna, Ricardo

publication date

  • January 2014