The Use of Air-Pressure Sensor in Electrolaryngeal Speech Enhancement Based on Statistical Voice Conversion

In our previous work, we proposed a speaking-aid system converting electrolaryngeal speech (EL speech) to normal speech using a statistical voice conversion technique. The main weakness of our system is the difficulty of estimating natural contours of the fundamental frequency (F-0) from EL speech including only built-in F-0 contours. This paper proposes another speaking-aid system with an air-pressure sensor to enable laryngectomees to control F-0 contours of the EL speech using their breathing air. The experimental result demonstrates that 1) the correlation coefficient of F-0 contours between the converted and the target speech is improved from 0.58 to 0.78 by the use of the air-pressure sensor and 2) the synthetic speech converted by the proposed system sounds more natural and is more preferred to that by our conventional aid system.