Welcome!
In 2000, the Signal Processing and Speech Communication Laboratory (SPSC Lab) of Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) was founded as a research and education center in nonlinear signal processing and computational intelligence, algorithm engineering, as well as circuits & systems modeling and design. It covers applications in wireless communications, speech/audio communication, and telecommunications.
If you want to learn more about Signal Processing, click: What is Signal Processing?
The Research of SPSC Lab addresses fundamental and applied research problems in five scientific areas:
- Audio and Acoustics
- Intelligent Systems
- Nonlinear Signal Processing
- Speech Communication
- Wireless Communications
Profiles
Result of the Month
Lightweight and Perceptually-Guided Voice Conversion for Electro-Laryngeal Speech
Electro-laryngeal (EL) speech is characterized by constant pitch, limited prosody, and mechanical noise, reducing naturalness and intelligibility. We propose a lightweight adaptation of the state-of-the-art, real-time voice conversion model (StreamVC) for EL speech to this setting by removing pitch and energy modules and combining self-supervised pretraining with supervised fine-tuning on parallel EL & healthy (HE) speech data. We pretrained it on over 500 hours of healthy German speech, and developed a custom Whisper- and DTW-based alignment pipeline to handle the large acoustic mismatch between EL and healthy recordings. The model was then fine-tuned on aligned EL–healthy speech pairs using perceptual and intelligibility-guided losses. A comparison of loss configurations through automatic metrics and a 22-participant listening test identified the best-performing variant and highlighted prosody and intelligibility as the key remaining challenges in electrolaryngeal to healthy voice conversion.
Read the full article.Contact: Benedikt Mayrhofer