Sequence-to-sequence Modelling of F0 for Speech Emotion Conversion
Carl Robinson, Nicolas Obin, Axel Roebel
Abstract
Voice interfaces are becoming wildly popular and driving demand for more advanced speech synthesis and voice transformation systems. Current text-to-speech methods produce realistic sounding voices, but they lack the emotional expressivity that listeners expect, given the context of the interaction and the phrase being spoken. Emotional voice conversion is a research domain concerned with generating expressive speech from neutral synthesised speech or natural human voice. This research investigated the effectiveness of using a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) encoder-decoder based model to transform the intonation of a human voice from neutral to expressive speech, with some preliminary introduction of linguistic conditioning. A subjective experiment conducted on the task of speech emotion recognition by listeners successfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed sequence-to-sequence models to produce convincing voice emotion transformations. In particular, conditioning the model on the position of the syllable in the phrase significantly improved recognition rates.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icassp2019_sequencetosequen,
title = {Sequence-to-sequence Modelling of F0 for Speech Emotion Conversion},
author = {Carl Robinson and Nicolas Obin and Axel Roebel},
booktitle = {ICASSP 2019},
year = {2019}
}