Researchers rebuild a voice

A new technique designed to reconstruct the voices of people who have had their vocal cords removed, has been applied by researchers at the University of Sheffield. Students and academics in the Departments of Computer Science and Human Communication Sciences have helped reconstruct the voice of patient Bernadette Chapman, who had a larynjectomy operation to remove her vocal cords after developing cancer. Researchers took recordings of the patient´s voice prior to the operation and in collaboration with the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Speech Technology Research, who developed the theory and supplied software, used a speech synthesis technique based on statistical models of speech sounds. This used the patient´s recordings to adapt an 'average voice model' to sound like the person concerned. Once a voice is built, it is possible to synthesise any sentence by supplying the word sequence. The voice was built using around seven minutes of speech from the client, which amounted to 100 sentences. This method is therefore much more practical than established `Voice Banking´ technologies which require two or three hours of recording to build a voice.