Fast Prosody Modification using Instants of Significant Excitation
S R M Prasanna, D Govind, K Sreenivasa Rao, B Yegnanarayana, IIT Guwahati
The objective of this work is to propose a fast method for prosody modification using the instants of significant excitation.The proposed method is significantly faster than the existing method based on finding the instants using group-delay and using the LP residual for incorporating the desired prosody features. This is achieved by (i) using the zero frequency filtering (ZFF) method for finding the instants of significant excitation instead of group-delay, and (ii) direct manipulation of the speech waveform rather than the Linear Prediction (LP) residual. Subjective studies indicate that the modified speech is of good quality with minimum distortion.