Voice conversion for emotional speech: Rule-based synthesis with degree of emotion controllable in dimensional space

This paper proposes a rule-based voice conversion system for emotion which is capable of converting neutral speech to emotional speech using dimensional space (arousal and valence) to control the degree of emotion on a continuous scale. We propose an inverse three-layered model with acoustic feature...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Speech communication 2018-09, Vol.102, p.54-67
Main Authors: Xue, Yawen, Hamada, Yasuhiro, Akagi, Masato
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Adaptive systems
Arousal
Communication
Connectors
Conversion
Emotion dimension
Emotional voice conversion
Emotions
Fujisaki F0 model
Fundamental frequency
Fuzzy systems
Inference
Linguistics
Perceptions
Prosody
Rule-based speech synthesis
Semantics
Speech
Stability
Target prediction model
Three-layered model
Valence
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Summary:This paper proposes a rule-based voice conversion system for emotion which is capable of converting neutral speech to emotional speech using dimensional space (arousal and valence) to control the degree of emotion on a continuous scale. We propose an inverse three-layered model with acoustic features as output at the top layer, semantic primitives at the middle layer and emotion dimension as input at the bottom layer; an adaptive-based fuzzy inference system acts as connectors to extract the non-linear rules among the three layers. The rules are applied by modifying the acoustic features of neutral speech to create the different types of emotional speech. The prosody-related acoustic features of F0 and power envelope are parameterized using the Fujisaki model and target prediction model separately. Perceptual evaluation results show that the degree of emotion can be perceived well in the dimensional space of valence and arousal.
ISSN:0167-6393
1872-7182
DOI:10.1016/j.specom.2018.06.006