Neutral to anger speech conversion using non-uniform duration modification

In this paper, the non-uniform duration modification is exploited along with other prosody features for neutral speech to anger speech conversion. The non-uniform duration modification method modifies the durations of vowel and pause segments by different modification factors. Vowel segments are modified by factors based on their identities, and pause segments by uniform factors. Consonant and transition segments are not modified. These modification factors are derived from the analysis of neutral and anger speech. For this purpose, a well known Indian database named as the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur Simulated Emotion Speech Corpus (IITKGP-SESC) is chosen for analysis of emotions and synthesis of emotions from neutral speech. The prosodic features used in this study for emotion conversion are pitch contour, intensity contour, and duration contour. Subjective listening test results show that the effectiveness of perception of emotion is better in case of non-uniform duration modification than uniform duration modification.