Rejection phenomena in inter-signal voice transplantations

The voice modification system studied allows selected voice characteristics (pitch, loudness, timing, and/or timbre) to be transplanted from a given donor utterance onto another (patient) utterance. Several potential applications exist for such a system, depending on the voice characteristics that are transplanted. The examples studied here are lip synchronization, voice dubbing and karaoke. Using overlap-add techniques for the actual speech modification, high quality results have been obtained that convincingly illustrate the potential of voice transplantation. In order to make voice transplantation widely applicable, its robustness should be further improved in order to avoid rejection of the transplanted characteristics, as discussed in some detail.