TY - CONF T1 - On the limitations of voice conversion techniques in emotion identication tasks T2 - 10th Conference on Speech Communicacion and Technology (Eurospeech/Interspeech 2007) Y1 - 2007 A1 - Roberto Barra-Chicote A1 - Juan Manuel Montero A1 - Javier Macias-Guarasa A1 - Juana Maria Gutierrez-Arriola A1 - Javier Ferreiros A1 - Ricardo Cordoba KW - emotional speech KW - speech synthesis KW - voice conversion AB - The growing interest in emotional speech synthesis urges effective emotion conversion techniques to be explored. This paper estimates the relevance of three speech components (spectral envelope, residual excitation and prosody) for synthesizing identifiable emotional speech, in order to be able to customize the voice conversion techniques to the specific characteristics of each emotion. The analysis has been based on listening a set of synthetic mixed-emotional utterances that draw their speech components from emotional and neutral recordings. Results prove the importance of transforming residual excitation for the identification of emotions that are not fully conveyed through prosodic means (such as cold anger or sadness in our Spanish corpus). JF - 10th Conference on Speech Communicacion and Technology (Eurospeech/Interspeech 2007) CY - Antwerp, Belgium ER -