Reconstructing Neutral Speech from Tracheoesophageal Speech

2010 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2010

This paper presents a novel method of enhancing esophageal speech using statistical voice conversion. Esophageal speech is one of the alternative speaking methods for laryngectomees. Although it doesn't require any external devices, generated voices sound unnatural. To improve the intelligibility and naturalness of esophageal speech, we propose a voice conversion method from esophageal speech into normal speech. A spectral parameter and excitation parameters of target normal speech are separately estimated from a spectral parameter of the esophageal speech based on Gaussian mixture models. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields significant improvements in intelligibility and naturalness. We also apply one-to-many eigenvoice conversion to esophageal speech enhancement for flexibly controlling enhanced voice quality.

Applied Sciences

Laryngectomees are individuals whose larynx has been surgically removed, usually due to laryngeal cancer. The immediate consequence of this operation is that these individuals (laryngectomees) are unable to speak. Esophageal speech (ES) remains the preferred alternative speaking method for laryngectomees. However, compared to the laryngeal voice, ES is characterized by low intelligibility and poor quality due to chaotic fundamental frequency F0, specific noises, and low intensity. Our proposal to solve these problems is to take advantage of voice conversion as an effective way to improve speech quality and intelligibility. To this end, we propose in this work a novel esophageal–laryngeal voice conversion (VC) system based on a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model combined with an auditory attention mechanism. The originality of the proposed framework is that it adopts an auditory attention technique in our model, which leads to more efficient and adaptive feature mapping. In additio...

2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2012

This paper describes a voice quality control method in statistical esophageal speech enhancement. Esophageal speech is produced by one of the alternative speaking methods for laryngectomees. Its naturalness and intelligibility are much lower than those of natural voices and its voice quality sounds similar even if uttered by different laryngectomees. These issues are alleviated by a statistical voice conversion method from esophageal speech into normal speech (ESto-Speech) based on eigenvoices. This method is capable of determining converted voice quality using a few target voice samples. In this paper, we propose ES-to-Speech using regression techniques to make it possible to manually control the converted voice quality by manipulating a few intuitively controllable parameters even if no target voice sample is available. The effectiveness of the proposed method is confirmed by experimental evaluations.

Conference proceedings : ... Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual Conference, 2009

Evaluation of the quality of tracheoesophageal (TE) speech using machines instead of human experts can enhance the voice rehabilitation process for patients who have undergone total laryngectomy and voice restoration. Towards the goal of devising a reference-free TE speech quality estimation algorithm, we investigate the efficacy of speech signal features that are used in standard telephone-speech quality assessment algorithms, in conjunction with a recently introduced speech modulation spectrum measure. Tests performed on two TE speech databases demonstrate that the modulation spectral measure and a subset of features in the standard ITU-T P.563 algorithm estimate TE speech quality with better correlation (up to 0.9) than previously proposed features.

2006

The tracheoesophageal (TE) substitute voice is currently state-of-the-art treatment to restore the ability to speak after laryngectomy. The intelligibility while talking over a telephone is an important clinical factor, as it is a crucial part of the patients' social life. An objective way to rate the intelligibility of substitute voices when talking over a telephone is desirable to improve the post-laryngectomy speech therapy. An automatic speech recognition (ASR) system was applied to 41 high quality recordings of post-laryngectomy patients. The ASR system was trained with normal, non-pathologic speech. It yielded a word accuracy (WA) of 36.9%±18.0%; compared to the intelligibility rating of a group of human experts the ASR system had a correlation coefficient of -.88. After downsampling the 41 recordings to telephone quality, the ASR system reached a WA of 26.4%±13.9% leading to a correlation coefficient of -.80. These results confirm that an ASR system can be used for objective intelligibility rating over the telephone.

Collegium antropologicum, 2012

The aim of this study was to analyze the voice quality of alaryngeal tracheoesophageal and esophageal speech, and to determine which of them is more similar to laryngeal voice production, and thus more acceptable as a rehabilitation method of laryngectomized persons. Objective voice evaluation was performed on a sample of 20 totally laryngectomized subjects of both sexes, average age 61.3 years. Subjects were divided into two groups: 10 (50%) respondents with built tracheoesophageal prosthesis and 10 (50%) who acquired esophageal speech. Testing included 6 variables: 5 parameters of acoustic analysis of voice and one parameter of aerodynamic measurements. The obtained data was statistically analyzed by analysis of variance. Analysis of the data showed a statistically significant difference between the two groups in the terms of intensity, fundamental frequency and maximum phonation time of vowel at a significance level of 5% and confidence interval of 95%. A statistically significan...

European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Laryngology, 2007

In comparison with laryngeal voice, substitute voice after laryngectomy is characterized by restricted aero-acoustic properties. Until now, an objective means of prosodic diVerences between substitute and normal voices does not exist. In a pilot study, we applied an automatic prosody analysis module to 18 speech samples of laryngectomees (age: 64.2 § 8.3 years) and 18 recordings of normal speakers of the same age (65.4 § 7.6 years). Ninety-Wve diVerent features per word based upon the speech energy, fundamental frequency F 0 and duration measures on words, pauses and voiced/voiceless sections were measured. These reXect aspects of loudness, pitch and articulation rate. Subjective evaluation of the 18 patients' voices was performed by a panel of Wve experts on the criteria "noise", "speech eVort", "roughness", "intelligibility", "match of breath and sense units" and "overall quality". These ratings were compared to the automatically computed features. Several of them could be identiWed being twice as high for the laryngectomees compared to the normal speakers, and vice versa. Comparing the evaluation data of the human experts and the automatic rating, correlation coeYcients of up to 0.84 were measured. The automatic analysis serves as a good means to objectify and quantify the global speech outcome of laryngectomees. Even better results are expected when both the computation of the features and the compari-son method to the human ratings will have been revised and adapted to the special properties of the substitute voices.

Iraqi journal of information and communication technology, 2022

Speech coding is a method of earning a tight speech signals representation for efficient storage and efficient transmission over band-limited wired or wireless channels. This is usually achieved with acceptable representation and the least number of bits without depletion in the perceptual quality. A number of speech coding methods have already been developed and various speech coding algorithms for speech analysis and synthesis are used. This paper deals with the comparison of selected coding methods for speech signals produced by the Electro Larynx (EL) device. The latter is a device used by cancer patients with their vocal laryngeal cords being removed. The used methods are Residual-Excited Linear Prediction (RELP), Code Excited Linear Prediction (CELP), Algebraic Code Excited Linear Predictive (ACELP), Phase Vocoders based on Wavelet Transform (PVWT), Channel Vocoders based on Wavelet Transform (CVWT), and Phase vocoder based on Dual-Tree Rational-Dilation Complex Wavelet Transform (PVDT-RADWT). The aim here is to select the best coding approach based on the quality of the reproduced speech. The signal used in the test is speech signal recorded either directly by normal persons or else produced by EL device. The performance of each method is evaluated using both objective and subjective listening tests. The results indicate that PVWT and ACELP coders perform better than other methods having about 40 dB SNR and 3 PESQ score for EL speech and 75 dB with 3.5 PESQ score for normal speech, respectively.

2001

A physically-informed glottal model is proposed; some physical information is retained in a linear block that accounts for fold mechanics, while non-linear coupling with the airflow is modeled using a regressorbased mapping. The model is used in an identification/resynthesis scheme. Given a real signal, system parameters are estimated via non-linear identification techniques; then the model is used for resynthesizing the signal. With a proper choice of the regressor set the system accurately fits the target waveform and is stable during resynthesis. Physical parameters can be used to change voice quality and speaker identity.

2011 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2011

In this study, we evaluate our proposed methods for enhancing alaryngeal speech based on statistical voice conversion techniques. Voice conversion based on a Gaussian mixture model has been applied to the conversion of alaryngeal speech into normal speech (AL-to-Speech). Moreover, one-to-many eigenvoice conversion (EVC) has also been applied to AL-to-Speech to enable the recovery of the original voice quality of laryngectomees even if only one arbitrary utterance of the original voice is available. VC/EVC-based AL-to-Speech systems have been developed for several types of alaryngeal speech, such as esophageal speech (ES), electrolaryngeal speech (EL), and body-conducted silent electrolaryngeal speech (silent EL). These proposed systems are compared with each other from various perspectives. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed systems yield significant enhancement effects on each type of alaryngeal speech.