STRAIGHT, a speech analysis, modification and synthesis system

Wakayama University , 和歌山大学 last update: Thu Dec 3 20:32:36 JST 2009

Introduction

STRAIGHT is a tool for manipulating voice quality, timbre and pitch. It is an always evolving system for attaining better sound quality, that is close to the original natural speech, by introducing advanced signal processing algorithms and findings in computational aspects of auditory processing.

STRAIGHT decomposes sounds into source information and resonator (filter) information. This conceptually simple decompositon makes it easy to conduct experiments on speech perception using STRAIGHT, the initial design objective of this tool, and to interprete experimental results in terms of huge body of classical studies.

The most up to date STRAIGHT is called TANDEM-STRAIGHT (2008 ICASSP) that is a complete reformulation based on a new representation of power spectra of periodic signals. The original idea which lead to STRAIGHT was emerged at ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratory in 1996. The first stage of development was supported by Japan Science and Technology agency (JST), under its CREST research promotion program. This "Auditory Brain Project" established the foundation of STRAIGHT and initiated subsequent research and development of varoous applications based on STRAIGHT.

Availability of STRAIGHT

There are two contact points to get access to STRAIGHT codes. For academic use, please contact to the author of the system. For non-academic use, please contact to the technical liaison office. Please put a word "STRAIGHT" in the Subject field of your mail.

What STRAIGHT can do (our work)

• New demo movies on TANDEM-STRAIGHT and morphing.(03/Dec./2009)
  • A quick tour of GUI
    • From analysis to simple synthesis
    • Morphing interactively using GUI
    • Stimulus continuum generation using GUI for setting end points
    • Editing V/UV boundary
• TANDEM-STRAIGHT-based morphing with temporally variable morphing rates
  • (movie) Temporally variable morphing using Matlab GUI (12 MB) (Details of the method will be presented at ICASSP2009)
  • (movie) From TANDEM-STRAIGHT analysis through temporal anchoring to morphing using Matlab GUI (14.2 MB) (Frequency anchoring is skipped in this introduction.)This movie is obsolete. Will be replaced soon.
• TANDEM-STRAIGHT, a complete reformulation of STRAIGHT:
  • (movie) GUI-based parameter manipulation (11 MB)
  • (video) TANDEM-STRAIGHT and morphing in CrestMuse project (24 MB)
• 26 March, 2007: Monthly meeting of the Speech Committee of IEICEJ and Acoustical Society of Japan
  • Speech conversion method: only uses mono syllabic Japanese five vowels.
  • original speech /tanosinderu/ (Are you enjoying? in Japanese), isolated Japanese five vowels /a/, /i/, /u/, /e/ and /o/, converted speech /tanosinderu/
• 19 December, 2006: 2006 Symposium of the Comprehensive Development of e-Society Foundation; Software program
  • Real-time version of STRAIGHT running on a tublet computer. （demonstration movie） （ linke to our paper on real-time STRAIGHT）
• 26 October, 2006: First CrestMuse symposium of 2006.10/26 CrestMuse project
  • Demonstration of morphing singers' voice identity and singing style (GUI image of the demonstration)
• 23 April to 15 August, 2005: Demonstration presented at the event "LOVE STORIES - Why you are not alone". held at 2005.4/23〜8/15 National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation.
  • Three-way morphing of emotional speech (Flash movie) （brief notes）
• 3 to 5 June, 2004: Participated in the 4th Rencon (Contest for Performance Rendering Systems)
  Synthetic chorus produced by STRAIGHT was rated as the best synthetic vocal performance. ( links to two pieces of synthetic chorus)
• 1 to 3 September, 2003: Participated in Education Arena held in EUROSPEECH 2003
  Archive page of the materials presented
• February, 2001: Joint meeting of speech committee of IEICEJ, hearing meeting of the Acoustical Society of Japan and Special Interest group on MUSic and computer of IPSJ （ related materials [in Japanese] ）
• Synthetic chorus quintet and the original voice fragments （male voice, female voice）
• March, 2000: Monthly meeting of the Speech Committee of IEICEJ and Acoustical Society of Japan (demonstrations are in Japanese)
• Original utterance /kohi ni miruku wo iremasu ka/ Coffee with milk? in Japanese (female talker, 44100Hz sampling)
• Synthetic speech: without parameter modifications, 2 times of F0 and 1.25 times frequency axis, 3 times of F0 and 1.44 times frequency axis, 0.5 times of F0 and 0.8 times frequency axis

What STRAIGHT can do (contributions of users and collaborators)

A list of citations on STRAIGHT provides a overview of the range of applications. The followings show selected topics.

Selected articles and presentations

• Hideki Kawahara, Ikuyo Masuda-Kasuse and Alain de Cheveigne: Restructuring speech representations using a pitch-adaptive time-frequency smoothing and an instantaneous-frequency-based F0 extraction: Possible role of a reptitive structure in sounds, Speech Communication, 27, pp.187-207 (1999).
• Hideki Kawahara, Haruhiro Katayose, Alain de Cheveigne, Roy D. Patterson: Fixed Point Analysis of Frequency to Instantaneous Frequency Mapping for Accurate Estimation of F0 and Periodicity , Proc. EUROSPEECH'99, Volume 6, Page 2781-2784 (1999).
  
• Hideki Kawahara, Yoshinori Atake and Parham Zolfaghari: Accurate vocal event detection method based on a fixed-point to weighted average group delay, ICSLP-2000, Beijing, pp.664-667 2000 
• Parham Zolfaghari, Yoshinori Atake, Kiyohiro Shikano, Hideki Kawahara: Investigation of analysis and synthesis parameters of STRAIGHT by subjective evaluation, ICSLP-2000, Beijin
• H. Kawahara and P Zolfaghari: Systematic F0 glitches around vowel nasal transitions, EUROSPEECH'2001, pp.2459-2462, 2001.
• H. Kawahara, Jo Estill and O. Fujimura: Aperiodicity extraction and control using mixed mode excitation and group delay manipulation for a high quality speech analysis, modification and synthesis system STRAIGHT, MAVEBA 2001, Sept.13-15, Firentze Italy, 2001.
• Hideki Kawahara, Parham Zolfaghari and Alain de Cheveigne, "On F0 Trajectory for very high-quality speech manipulation" ICSLP'2002, (2002).
• Hideki Kawahara and Hisami Matsui: Auditory morphing based on an elastic perceptual distance metric in an interference-free time-frequency representation, Proc. ICASSP'2003, vol.I, pp.256-259, 2003.
• Hisami Matsui, Hideki Kawahara, Investigation of Emotionally Morphed Speech Perception and its Structure Using a High Quality Speech Manipulation System Prod. Eurospeech'03, pp. 2113-2116, 2003.
• Hideki Kawahara: Exemplar-based Voice Quality Analysis and Control using a High Quality Auditory Morphing Procedure based on STRAIGHT, VOQUAL'03, ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop, Geneva, August 27-29, 2003, pp.109-114.
• Hideki Kawahara, Hideki Banno, Toshio Irino and Parham Zolfaghari, ALGORITHM AMALGAM: Morphing waveform based methods, sinusoidal models and STRAIGHT, Proc. ICASSP'2004, Montreal Canada, pp.13-16 (2004)
• Hideki Kawahara, Alain de Cheveigne, Hideki Banno, Toru Takahashi and Toshio Irino, Nearly Defect-free F0 Trajectory Extraction for Expressive Speech Modifications based on STRAIGHT, Proc. Interspeech2005, Lisboa, pp.537-540, Sept. 2005.
• Hideki Kawahara: STRAIGHT, Exploration of the other aspect of VOCODER: Perceptually isomorphic decomposition of speech sounds, Acoustic Science and Technology, Vol.27, No.6, pp.349-353 (2006) (link to PDF page)
• Hideki Kawahara, Osamu Fujimura and Yasuyuki Konparu, Voice as Artistic Expression in Noh, presented at the Joint Meeting of ASA and ASJ, Honolulu 2006 (link to the lay language paper on ASA press room)
• Hideki Banno, Hiroaki Hata, Masanori Morise, Toru Takahashi, Toshio Irino and Hideki Kawahara, "Implementation of realtime STRAIGHT speech manipulation system: Report on its first implementation," Acoustic Science and Technology, Vol.28, pp.140-146 (2007) (link to PDF page)