PhD Opportunity in Speech Transformation

A full-time 3 year PhD position is available at France Telecom – Orange Labs in Lannion, France.
The position is within Orange Labs speech synthesis team and under academic supervision by Prof. Stylianou from Multimedia Informatics Laboratory at the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece. Both labs conduct world class research in speech processing in areas like speech synthesis, speech transformation, voice conversion and speech coding.

Starting date: September 2010/January 2011
Application dates: March 30th 2010/October 30th 2010
Research fields: Speech processing, speech synthesis, pattern recognition, statistical signal processing, machine learning.

Project Description:
Speech transformation refers to the various modifications one may apply to the sound produced by a person, speaking or singing. It covers a wide area of research from speech production modeling and understanding to perception of speech, from natural language processing, modeling and control of speaking style, to pattern recognition and statistical signal processing. Speech Transformation has many potential applications in areas like entertainment, film and music industry, toys, chat rooms and games, dialog systems, security and speaker individuality for interpreting telephony, high-end hearing aids, vocal pathology and voice restoration.
In speech transformation, the majority of work is dedicated to pitch modification as well as to timbre transformation. Many techniques have been suggested in the literature, among which methods based on PSOLA, Sinusoidal Modeling, Harmonic plus Noise Model, Phase Vocoder and STRAIGHT. The above methods yield high quality for moderate pitch modifications and for well-mastered spectral envelope modifications. For more sophisticated transformations, the output speech cannot be considered natural.
During this thesis, we will focus on the re-definition of pitch and timbre modification in order to develop a high quality speech modification system. This will be designed and developed in the context of a quasi-harmonic speech representation which was recently suggested for high-quality speech analysis and synthesis purposes.
Salary: around 1700 € net per month.
Please send applications (CV+ 2 ref letters) or questions to:
Yannis Stylianou
Tel: +30 2810 391713
styliano@ics.forth.gr
Olivier Rosec
Tel: +33 2 96 05 20 67
olivier.rosec@orange-ftgroup.com