Modification of voice waveforms to change social signaling
First Claim
1. A method of altering a selected real-time social signaling characteristic of an input audio voice signal, which method comprises processing in real-time said input audio voice signal in to modify one or more measurable parameters of said input audio voice signal to produce a modified output audio voice signal in which said selected real-time social signaling characteristic is modified, wherein said input audio voice signal is not generated by a speech synthesizer.
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Abstract
A method of altering a social signaling characteristic of a speech signal. A statistically large number of speech samples created by different speakers in different tones of voice are evaluated to determine one or more relationships that exist between a selected social signaling characteristic and one or more measurable parameters of the speech samples. An input audio voice signal is then processed in accordance with these relationships to modify one or more of controllable parameters of input audio voice signal to produce a modified output audio voice signal in which said selected social signaling characteristic is modified. In a specific illustrative embodiment, a two-level hidden Markov model is used to identify voiced and unvoiced speech segments and selected controllable characteristics of these speech segments are modified to alter the desired social signaling characteristic.
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20 Claims
- 1. A method of altering a selected real-time social signaling characteristic of an input audio voice signal, which method comprises processing in real-time said input audio voice signal in to modify one or more measurable parameters of said input audio voice signal to produce a modified output audio voice signal in which said selected real-time social signaling characteristic is modified, wherein said input audio voice signal is not generated by a speech synthesizer.
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8. A system for modifying an audio input signal, the audio input signal comprising voiced segments and unvoiced segments, and said system comprising, in combination,
a microphone for producing the audio input signal, and a signal processor for modifying said audio input signal to alter one or more attributes of at least selected ones of the voiced segments to alter one or more real-time social signaling characteristics of the audio input signal to form an audio output signal.
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15. Apparatus for automatically modifying one or more real-time social signaling characteristics of an audio input signal to produce a modified audio output signal comprising, in combination,
a digital signal analyzer for determining the boundaries between speech segments and non-speech segments of said audio input signal, a digital signal processor for modifying one or more controllable parameters of said speech segments to produce modified speech segments having one or more modified real-time social signaling characteristics, and output means for combining said modified speech segments with said non-speech segments to produce said modified audio output signal, wherein said audio input signal is from a microphone.
Specification