A new multi-speaker formant synthesizer that applies voice conversion techniques

Abstract

We present a multi-speaker formant synthesizer based on parameter concatenation. The user can choose among three speakers, two males and one female. The synthesizer stores all the parameters for the basic speaker and linear transformation functions to synthesized the other two. The complete database for one speaker consists of 455 parameterized units (diphones, triphones,...) and the parameters used are pitch, formants and bandwidths and source parameters (four parameters for the LF model, and glottal noise). To get the converted speaker we store a linear transformation function for each spectral stable segment of each unit. Preliminary results show that the quality of the synthesizer is very good and that this system can help us to study and understand the speaker variability problem.