AA SPECTRAL SPACE WARPING APPROACH TO CROSS-LINGUAL VOICE TRANSFORMATION IN HMM-BASED TTS

This paper presents a new approach to cross-lingual voice transformation in HMM-based TTS with only the recordings from two monolingual speakers in different languages (e.g. Mandarin and English). We aim to synthesize one speaker's speech in the other language. We regard the spectral space of any speaker to be composed of universal elementary units (i.e. tied-states) of speech in different languages. Our approach first forces the spectral spaces of the two speakers to have the same number of tied-states. Then we find an optimal one-to-one tied-state mapping between the two spectral spaces. Hence, the mapped speech trajectory in the spectral space of the target speaker can be found according to that generated in the spectral space of the reference speaker. Consequently, we can synthesize high-quality speech for the target monolingual speaker's voice in the other language. This can also be used as training data for a new TTS system.