A novel method for voice conversion based on non-parallel corpus

This article puts forward a new algorithm for voice conversion which not only removes the necessity of parallel corpus in the training phase but also resolves the issue of insufficiency of the target speaker’s corpus. The proposed approach is based on one of the new voice conversion models utilizing classical LPC analysis-synthesis model combined with GMM. Through this algorithm, the conversion functions among vowels and demi-syllables are derived. We assumed that these functions are rather the same for different speakers if their genders, accents, and languages are alike. Therefore, we will be able to produce the demi-syllables with just having access to few sentences from the target speaker and forming the GMM for one of his/her vowels. The results from the appraisal of the proposed method for voice conversion clarifies that this method has the ability to efficiently realize the speech features of the target speaker. It can also provide results comparable to the ones obtained through the parallel-corpus-based approaches. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.