Voice Montage

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The goal of this research is to find a way to realize "voice montage" by comprehensively investigating fundamental properties of voice, especially based on the past achievement of the "grant-in-aid for exploratory research" project in 1998-1999. The results are described below.In 2000, several experiments were designed and executed to hypothesize whether one can remember the others' voice quality. In these experiments, the auditory impression of the others' voice was evaluated with the voice-quality-related everyday expressions which were established in the past research. As a result, we confirmed the following major premise for realizing voice montage : "Man has the ability to fairly precisely maintain the memory of heard voice's quality for a certain period of time, even for unknown voice."In 2001, the relationship between acoustic parameters and voice-quality-related expressions was examined, which would be important for synthesizing voice from the auditory impression. First, depend … More ence of the acoustic parameters were investigated using graphical modeling. Next, the relationship between the acoustic parameters and the evaluation in auditory experiments was modeled by the non-linear decision tree. Consequently, the result seems to be more reasonable than that of linear multiple regression. For example, the non-linear analysis indicates that speaking rate is the second most important factor next to fundamental frequency for describing "high-pitched voice."In addition, we have started the construction of the set of expressions related to para-linguistic/extra-linguistic information which is conveyed by voice. The expressions include speaking style and the ones which reflect hearers' sense of value, as well as the ones extracted in the previous research. The voice-related expression words were collected with the following method. Several workers aged from 20s to 60s were instructed to find voice-related words by carefully scanning all entries of a Japanese dictionary. 3,076 words out of 75,000 were collected through the work. Those words were then filtered and merged into 872 words by considering the agreement and apparent synonymity. Finally, the words were divided into four groups, i.e. the ones related to "voice quality," "speaking style," "speaking-style-oriented voice quality," and the ones which reflect hearers' sense of value. The expressions are thought to contain individuality information other than voice quality. Less