Considerations in voice transformation with physiologic scaling principles

This study begins to explore the importance of the physiological domain in voice transformation. A general approach is outlined for transforming the voice quality of sentence-level speech while maintaining the same phonetic content. Transformations will eventually include gender, age, voice quality, emotional state, disordered state, dialect or impersonation. In this paper, only a specific voice quality, twang, is described as an example. The basic question is: relative to pure signal processing, can voices be transformed more effectively if biomechanical, acoustic and anatomical scaling principles are applied? At present, two approaches are contrasted, a Linear Predictive Coding approach and a biomechanical simulation approach.