Transforming the vowel/diphthong formants of one Assamese variety to another: A GMM based approach

摘要

This study attempts to transform the formant frequencies of the vowels/diphthongs of one variety of the Assamese language to another variety, using a statistical approach based on Gaussian Mixture Models(GMMs). Formants are the resonant frequencies of the vocal tract and are responsible for the differences in quality among different periodic sounds. They can therefore be used to represent regional variations in the vowel and diphthong sounds. A GMM based mapping function is developed to map the most informative formants, F1, F2 & F3 of vowels/diphthongs of one variety of Assamese to the other. Objective evaluation results show that the mapping function is successful in bringing the vowel/diphthong formants of the source variety closer to the target variety.