Abstract
The control over aspects of the glottal source signal is fundamental to correctly modify relevant voice characteristics, such as breathiness. This voice quality is strongly related to the characteristics of the glottal source signal produced at the glottis, mainly the shape of the glottal pulse and the aspiration noise. This type of noise results from the turbulence of air passing through the glottis and it can be represented by an amplitude modulated Gaussian noise, which depends on the glottal volume velocity and glottal area. However, the dependency between the glottal signal and the noise component is usually not taken into account for transforming breathiness. In this paper, we propose a method for modelling the aspiration noise which permits to adapt the aspiration noise to take into account its dependency with the glottal pulse shape, while producing high-quality speech. The envelope of the amplitude modulated noise is estimated from the speech signal pitch-synchronously and then it is parameterized by using a non-linear polynomial fitting algorithm. Finally, an asymmetric triangular window is obtained from the non-linear polynomial representation for obtaining a shape of the energy envelope of the noise closer to that of the glottal source. In the experiments for voice transformation, both the proposed aspiration noise model and an acoustic glottal source model are used to transform a modal voice into breathy. Results show that the aspiration noise model improves the voice quality transformation compared with an excitation using only the glottal model and an excitation that combines the glottal source model and a spectral representation of the noise component.
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Cabral, J.P., Carson-Berndsen, J. (2013). Towards a Better Representation of the Envelope Modulation of Aspiration Noise. In: Drugman, T., Dutoit, T. (eds) Advances in Nonlinear Speech Processing. NOLISP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 7911. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38847-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38847-7_9
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