Faster prosody modification using time scaling of epochs

The objective of this work is to propose a simple and faster method for prosody modification that avoids complex procedure of deriving the modified epoch sequence. The proposed method processes the speech signal by zero frequency filtering (ZFF) to extract epochs. The extracted epochs are time scaled using the knowledge of given prosody modification factor. The prosody modified (PM) speech is obtained by copying the speech signal samples around the original epochs using the knowledge of time scaled epochs. The computational advantage of the proposed method is due to not deriving any modified pitch markers. The time scaled epochs act only as guiding sequence for the construction of prosody modified speech. The experimental results of the proposed method are compared with earlier epoch based prosody modification methods and found to provide same perceptual quality, but with a faster process.