In this paper, we first provide a review of the state-of-the-art emotional voice conversion research, and the existing emotional speech databases. We then motivate the development of a novel emotional speech database (ESD) that addresses the increasing research need. With this paper, the ESD database is now made available to the research community. The ESD database consists of 350 parallel utterances spoken by 10 native English and 10 native Chinese speakers and covers 5 emotion categories (neutral, happy, angry, sad and surprise). More than 29 hours of speech data were recorded in a controlled acoustic environment. The database is suitable for multi-speaker and cross-lingual emotional voice conversion studies. As case studies, we implement several state-of-the-art emotional voice conversion systems on the ESD database. This paper provides a reference study on ESD in conjunction with its release.

本文介绍了情感语音转换研究的最新进展以及现有的情感语音数据库，并且提出了一种新的情感语音数据库（ESD）来满足不断增长的研究需求，在控制的声学环境下记录了超过29个小时的音频数据，包括10位英语和10位中文讲话者的350个平行发声，分别涵盖中性、快乐、愤怒、悲伤和惊讶5种情感类别。此外，本文还在ESD数据库上实现了几个最先进的情感语音转换系统，并提供了ESD的参考研究。

情感语音转换：理论、数据库与ESD