HMM adaptation and voice conversion for the synthesis of child speech: a comparison

This study compares two different methodologies for producing data-driven synthesis of child speech from existing systems that have been trained on the speech of adults. On one hand, an existing statistical parametric synthesiser is transformed using model adaptation techniques, informed by linguistic and prosodic knowledge, to the speaker characteristics of a child speaker. This is compared with the application of voice conversion techniques to convert the output of an existing waveform concatenation synthesiser with no explicit linguistic or prosodic knowledge. In a subjective evaluation of the similarity of synthetic speech to natural speech from the target speaker, the HMM-based systems evaluated are generally preferred, although this is at least in part due to the higher dimensional acoustic features supported by these techniques. Index Terms: child speech, statistical parametric speech synthesis, HMM-based speech synthesis, voice conversion, HTS, Average Voice Models, Festival