Multidimensional scaling of systems in the Voice Conversion Challenge 2016

Abstract

This study investigates how listeners judge the similarity of voice converted voices using a talker discrimination task. The data used is from the Voice Conversion Challenge 2016. 17 participants from around the world took part in building voice converted voices from a shared data set of source and target speakers. This paper describes the evaluation of similarity for four of the source-target pairs (two intra-gender and two cross-gender) in more detail. Multidimensional scaling was performed to illustrate where each system was perceived to be in an acoustic space compared to the source and target speakers and to each other.