A Comparative Evaluation of Pitch Modification Techniques

TL;DR

This paper compares various pitch modification techniques, including a proposed deterministic plus stochastic model, highlighting its effectiveness especially for male voices and significant pitch shifts, and analyzing factors like speaker gender.

Contribution

It introduces a comparative evaluation of pitch modification methods, emphasizing the effectiveness of the DSM technique over traditional methods in certain conditions.

Findings

DSM achieves similar or better results than other methods for male voices.

DSM outperforms others except compared to STRAIGHT for female voices.

The influence of speaker gender and pitch ratio on method performance is analyzed.

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of pitch modification, as an important module for an efficient voice transformation system. The Deterministic plus Stochastic Model of the residual signal we proposed in a previous work is compared to TDPSOLA, HNM and STRAIGHT. The four methods are compared through an important subjective test. The influence of the speaker gender and of the pitch modification ratio is analyzed. Despite its higher compression level, the DSM technique is shown to give similar or better results than other methods, especially for male speakers and important ratios of modification. The DSM turns out to be only outperformed by STRAIGHT for female voices.