This paper presents an HMM-based method and ex-perimental results for voice conversion between UK and US accented English. Phonetic-tree based tied-state triphone HMMs are used to map equivalent states of the source and target spectra. Then a linear transformation method is incorporated to estimate the most likely target spectra for a given input. The map-ping is between two different sets of phoneme i.e. the 44-phoneme UK English BEEP phone set and 39-phoneme US CMU phone set. Finally, a prosody ad-aptation is applied to tune the prosodic parameters. The experiments are based on voice conversion be-tween speakers speaking different unrestricted texts. Acoustic-phonetic mapping between two different ac-cents database enables us to attempt to deconstruct accents to investigate how they are distributed among different parameters such as spectra, energy contour, pitch, and duration.
Cite as: Ho, C.-H., Vaseghi, S., Chen, A. (1999) Voice conversion between UK and US accented English. Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999), 2079-2082, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-461
@inproceedings{ho99b_eurospeech,
author={Ching-Hsiang Ho and Saeed Vaseghi and Aimin Chen},
title={{Voice conversion between UK and US accented English}},
year=1999,
booktitle={Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999)},
pages={2079--2082},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-461}
}