Automatic Phonetic Segmentation by Score Predictive Model for the Corpora of Mandarin Singing Voices

This paper proposes the concept of a score predictive model (SPM) that can refine the phoneme boundaries obtained by a hidden Markov model (HMM) and dynamic time warping (DTW) for a Mandarin singing voice corpus. An SPM is constructed by using support vector regression. It predicts the score of a phoneme boundary according to the boundary's 58-dimensional feature vector. The correctly identified boundaries of a singing corpus can then be used for corpus-based singing voice synthesis. Several experiments with different settings, including the use of different initial estimates, different acoustic features, and various regression approaches, were designed to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SPM is able to effectively refine the results of the HMM and DTW.