VOICE MORPHING

PRESENTED BY I.PANNIMALAR ECE A FINAL YEAR

OUTLINES
What It is? Need of Voice Morphing Description of the Morphing.

Technical details of Morphing.

Application areas.

VOICE MORPHING
Voice morphing is a technique for modifying a (source) speaker's speech to sound as if it were spoken by a different (target) speaker. In Simpler terms it is being able to change the speech of one speaker to that of another speaker.
Technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA by George Papcun Applications for Voice Morphing range from recreational ones to security ones.

What it actually performs ?

It is a technique to modify a source speaker's speech to sound as if it was spoken by a target speaker. Voice morphing enables speech patterns to be cloned And an accurate copy of a person's voice can be made that can wishes to say, anything in the voice of

someone else.

NEED OF VOICE MORPHING

Text To Speech (TTS) In public speech systems For special effects ( just like video or image morphing is done ). To diminish Ethnical barriers.

HOW TO VOICE MORPH???

We need to effectively change the pitch from that of a male speaker to that of a female speaker. If we reminisce the excitation signal has

information about the speaker.

We find the LPC coefficients for the Source and Target Signals and

using these coefficients we are going to interpolate between the two

Signals. We get the New LPC (linear predictive coding) coefficients using the formula new lpc coeff = [const*(lpc source) + (1-const)(lpc target)] . 0 <= const <= 1

HOW TO MORPH ?? (CONT)

The pitch of the male speaker is 141Hz and that of the female speaker is 210Hz. We use time stretching algorithm to implement pitch shifting. We obtain the residue of the source signal and stretch it according to const. The const indicates what is the position of morphed signal in between the source and target.

HOW DO WE SHIFT PITCH??

o We break the residue signal into small windows and introduce fade in and fade out for each block.

o We recombine everything to form the pitch shifted signal.

o Based on the alpha we can time stretch the residue according to our requirements

HOW TO MORPH FINALLY???

o We now have the pitch shifted residue signal and the new LPC coefficients. o We should resample the pitch shifted signal so that it is played at a faster rate. [Remember when we pitch shift then the residue will last longer]. o If we inverse filter the resampled pitch shifted residue then we can effect morphing.

VOICE MORPHING PROCESS

Preprocessing or representation conversion. Pitch and Envelope analysis. Morphing which includes Warping and interpolation. Signal re-estimation.

BLOCK DIAGRAM

PRE-PROCESSING
Involves processes like signal acquisition in discrete form and windowing.

PITCH AND ENVELOPE ANALYSIS

This process will extract the pitch.
Formant information in the speech signal.

CONVERSION

MATCHING AND WARPING

DTW(Dynamic Time Warping)

Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) is used to find the best match between the pitch of the two sounds.
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SIGNAL RE-ESTIMATION

Loss during Signal re-estimation

Due to signals being transformation into the cepstral domain, a magnitude function is used. This results in a loss of phase information in the representation of the data.
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SUMMARIZED BLOCK DIAGRAM

LIMITATIONS

Lots of normalizing problems.

Some applications require extensive sound libraries. Different languages require different phonetics. It is very seldom complete.

ADVANTAGES
Allows speech model to be duplicated and an exact copy of a persons voice. Powerful combat zone weapon.

DISADVANTAGES
Use to pull out the useful information. It hides the actual identity of the user.

CONCLUSION
The approach we have adopted separates the sounds into two forms: - Spectral envelope information - Pitch and voicing information.

Dynamic Time Warping

- Aligns the sounds with respect to their pitches. Signal re-estimation algorithm. - Frames are converted back into a time domain waveform.

APPLICATION AREAS

Fake telephone conversations as evidence in courts of law. Powerful battlefield weapon. - Provide fake orders to the enemy's troops, appearing to come from their own commanders.

FUTURE SCOPE
Extending the functionality of tool. - Create a powerful and flexible morphing tool.

Increased user interaction.

- Graphical User Interface could be designed and integrated to make the package more user-friendly.