Prof. Hideki Kawahara (Auditory Media Laboratory) [link to Japanese page]

	Hideki Kawahara, Professor Auditory Media Laboratory Design Information Sciences Department Fuculty of Systems Engineering, Wakayama University 930 Sakaedani, Wakayama, Wakayama 640-8510, Japan Phone: +81-73-457-8461 Facsimile: +81-73-457-8112 e-mail: kawahara@sys.wakayama-u.ac.jp

Profile and activities

• Profile (short form)
  • Professor: Auditory Media Laboratory
  • Invited Researcher: ATR
• Lectures and classes (in Japanese)
• Demonstrations: [ Speech morphing], [ Synthesized chorus]
• List of STRAIGHT-based research papers

Topics

• Invited talk on "STRAIGHT as a research tool for L2 study: How to manipulate segmental and supra-segmental features" (organized by Jared C. Bernstein and Reiko Akahane-Yamada) at Fourth Joint Meeting of ASA and ASJ (Decemter 2006). [presentation slides (pdf)] [morphed synthetic R/L continuum (wmv)] [morphed natural R/L continuum (wmv)]
• Lay language paper on "Voice quality of artistic expression in Noh: An analysis-synthesis study on source-related parameters" was presented at Fourth Joint Meeting of ASA and ASJ (Decemter 2006).
• Auditory morphing demonstrations on emotional speech. (Flash movie) This demonstration was on display at National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation Tokyo from 23 April to 15 August. The title of the special event was "Love stories - Why you are not alone.". The interface was designed by Takashi Yamaguchi and auditory morphing sounds were synthesized by Hideki Kawahara using STRAIGHT-based morphing algorithm.
• STRAIGHT: A very high-quality speech manipulation system (tutorial page), (Publicly accessible STRAIGHT trial version) (The latest version of STRAIGHT (STRAIGHTV40) is available to the registered users.)(20 Sept. 2005)
• STRAIGHT based TTS (Text To Speech) system won the first place in the Blizzard challange and reported at INTERSPEECH2005. (Sept. 2005).
• "Temporal media design project" supported by CREST (2005 to 2010: PI is Prof. Katayose and I will take part) uses STRAIGHT as one of key components. (Sept. 2005).
• Invited talk on "Manipulating the pulse rate and resonance scale in speech and animal calls", at the special session "Size information in speech and animal calls" (organized by Patterson and Irino ) at the 149th ASA meeting in Vancouver, Canada. (May 2005).
• A STRAIGHT-generated chorus won the first place in blindfold listening test of synthetic vocal systems conducted by RENCON'04, (June 2004).
• WAVE : Wakayama workshop on Auditory and Vocal rEsearch (April 2004)
• e-Society project (primary investigator of a subgroup on flexible speech synthesis software)
• "Auditory brain project" by CREST (primary investigator,1997-2002) (CMAP-CREST workshop 2002)

Selected publications

• Hideki Banno, Hiroaki Hata, Masanori Morise, Toru Takahashi, Toshio Irino and Hideki Kawahara, "Implementatioin of realtime STRAIGHT speech manipulation system: Report on its first implementation," Acoustic Science and Technology, Vol.28, pp.140-146 (2007)
• Hideki Kawahara: STRAIGHT, Exploration of the other aspect of VOCODER: Perceptually isomorphic decomposition of speech sounds, Acoustic Science and Technology, Vol.27, No.6, (2006).[invited]
• Toshio Irino, Roy D. Patterson, and Hideki Kawahara, "Speech segregation using an auditory vocoder with event-synchronous enhancements," IEEE Trans. Speech and Audio Process., Vol.27, Issue 6, pp.2212-2221 (2006�).
• Yuko Sogabe, Hideki Kawahara and Kazuhiko Kakehi, Research on Emotional Perception of voices based on a morphing method, In: Voice and Emotion. K. Izdebski (Ed.) Plural Publishing: San Diego. (in press)
• 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.
• David R. R. Smith, Roy D. Patterson, Richard Turner, Hideki Kawahara and Toshio Irino, The processing and perception of size information in speech sounds, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 117(1), pp.305-318, Jan.2005.
• Hideki Kawahara, Hideki Banno, Toshio Irino and Parham Zolfaghari, ALGORITHM AMALGAM: MORPHING WAVEFORM BASED METHODS, SINUISOIDAL MODELS AND STRAIGHT, Proc. ICASSP'2004, Montreal Canada, vol.1, pp.13-16, 2004
• Hideki Kawahara: Computational Basis of Illusinary Pitch Perception, International Congress on Acoustics, 2004 (Invited Talk).
• Hideki Kawahara and Hisami Matsui: AUDITORY MORPHING BASED ON AN ELASTIC PERCEPTUAL DISTANCE METRIC IN AN INTERFERENCE-FREE TIME-FREQUENCY REPRESENTATION, ICASSP'2003, pp.256-259, 2003.
• Toshio Irino, Roy Patterson and Hideki Kawahara: SPEECH SEGREGATION USING EVENT SYNCHRONOUSAUDITORY VOCODER, ICASSP'2003, Hong Kong, 6-10 April 2003.
• Hideki Kawahara, Systematic downgrading for investigating ``naturalness'' in synthesized singing using STRAIGHT: A high quality VOCODER" 143rd meeting of the Acoust. Soc. Amer., Pittsburgh, June 3-7, (2002) (Invited Talk)
• Alain de Cheveigné,Hideki Kawahra, YIN, "a fundamental frequency estimator for speech and music" Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Vol.111, No.4, pp.1917-1930 (2002)
• 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.
• H. Kawahara and P Zolfaghari: Systematic F0 glitches around vowel nasal transitions, EUROSPEECH'2001, pp.2459-2462, 2001.
• 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.
• 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, Ikuyo Masuda-Katsuse 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). [1998-1999 EURASIP best paper award]
• Alain de Cheveigne,Hideki Kawahara,"Missing-data Model of Vowel Identification" J.Acoust.Soc.Am., Vol.105, pp.3497-3508, 1999.
• Hideki Kawahara, Alain de Cheveigne and Roy D. Patterson: ``An instantaneous-frequency-based pitch extraction method for high-quality speech transformation: revised TEMPO in the STRAIGHT-suite'', Proc. 5th Int. Conf. on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP '96), Sudney, (1998.12).
• Hiroko Kato and Hideki Kawahara: ``An Application of the Bayesian Time Series Model and Statistical System Analysis for F0 Control'', Speech Communication, (1998)
• Hideki Banno, J. Ju, Satoshi Nakamura, Kiyohiro Shikano and Hideki Kawahara: ``Efficient Representation of Short-time Phase Based on Group Delay'', ICASSP'98, SP26.6, Seattle, (1998.5).
• Alain DE CHEVEIGNE (CNRS), Hideki KAWAHARA, Minoru TSUZAKI, and Kiyoaki AIKAWA: ''Concurrent Vowel Identification I: Effects of relative Level and F0 Differences,'' J. Acoust. Soc. Am., Vol.101, pp.2839-2847 (1997.5)
• Hideki Kawahara: ''Speech Representation and Transformation using Adaptive Interpolation of Weighted Spectrum: VOCODER Revisited,'' Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP '97), vol.2, pp.1303-1306 (1997.4)