Reconstructing the Voice of an Individual Following Laryngectomy

Abstract

This case study describes the generation of a synthetic voice resembling that of an individual before she underwent a laryngectomy. Recordings of this person (6–7 min) speaking prior to the operation were used to create the voice. Synthesis was based on statistical speech models and this method allows models pre-trained on many speakers to be adapted to resemble an individual voice. The results of a listening test in which participants were asked to judge the similarity of the synthetic voice to the pre-operation (target) voice are reported. Members of the patient's family were asked to make a similar judgment. These experiments show that, for most listeners, the voice is quite convincing despite the low quality and small quantity of adaptation data.

Keywords:

• Laryngectomy
• Voice reconstruction
• Speech synthesis

Acknowledgement

The HTS speech synthesis software was used with the kind permission of Junichi Yamagishi of the University of Edinburgh.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.