InterSinging 2010 First Interdisciplinary Workshop on Singing Voice The University of Tokyo, Japan October 1-2, 2010

Resurrecting Past Singers: Non-Parallel Singing-Voice Conversion

Fernando Villavicencio, Hideki Kenmochi

Corporate Research and Development Center, YAMAHA Corporation, Japan

We present in this work a strategy to perform timbre conversion from un- paired source and target data and its application to the singing-voice synthe- sizer VOCALOID to produce sung utterances with a past singer voice. The conversion framework using unpaired data is based on a phoneme-constrained modeling of the timbre space and the assumption of a linear relation between the source and target features. The proposed nonparallel framework resulted in a performance close to the one following the traditional approach based on GMM and paired data. The application to convert an original singer database using sung performances of a past singer observed a successful perception of the past singer..s timbre on the singing-voice utterances performed by VOCALOID.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Villavicencio, Fernando / Kenmochi, Hideki (2010): "Resurrecting past singers: non-parallel singing-voice conversion", In InterSinging-2010, 39-44.