Newsgroups: comp.speech
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From: Chip Wood <wood>
Subject: Re: Male <=> Female Speech Synthesizer
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Organization: Motorola GSTG Speech and Signal Processing Lab
Date: Tue, 8 Aug 1995 23:14:07 GMT
Message-ID: <1995Aug8.231407.4286@schbbs.mot.com>
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>In article <40752b$af0@newsbf02.news.aol.com>, bullydog@aol.com (Bullydog)
writes:
>> >From: Clinton Keith <clint@angel.com>
>> >Our project requires that we synthesis speech that may have to 
>> >convert a male's voice to a female-sounding voice and vice-versa.
>> 
>> The quick and dirty way to achieve this is to use pitch shifting.. If you
>> don't shift things too far its not bad. The trick is not to speed up or
>> slow down the sample.


It's more complicated than that if you truly want to change voice gender.  The
female vocal tract is approximately 20% shorter than the male and her resonant
frequencies (formants) for any given sound will be shifted 20% higher.  This
however is a non-linear function and varies from phoneme to phoneme.  (See
Peterson and Barney data). So you have to account for this as well as the
higher pitch due to shorter vocal folds and the higher pitch's interaction with
the higher shifted formants. There is also experiments that show a female talks
faster and with more dynamic intonation than a male.

**************************************************************************
Chip Wood                                      chip_wood@email.mot.com
Speech and Signal Processing Laboratory        FAX: 602-441-4780
8201 E. McDowell Rd                            TEL: 602-441-4998
Motorola GSTG                         Everything should be made as simple
Scottsdale, AZ 85252 USA                      as possible,but not simpler.
 ***Opinions expressed are my own and not those of any other entity.***

