Voice restoration method

Patients who have had their vocal cords removed could have their voice restored with a new technique developed in the UK.

Researchers at Sheffield University recently demonstrated the technique on Bernadette Chapman, who had a laryngectomy operation to remove her vocal cords after developing cancer.

The Sheffield team took recordings of Chapman’s voice prior to the operation. The group then collaborated with the Edinburgh University’s Centre for Speech Technology Research to develop its theory and supply software for a speech-synthesis technique based on statistical models of speech sounds.

The technique used Chapman’s recordings to adapt an ’average voice model’. Once a voice is built, it is possible to synthesise any sentence by supplying the word sequence. The voice was built using about seven minutes of speech from Chapman, which amounted to 100 sentences.

The method is claimed to be more practical than established ‘voice banking´ technologies, which require two or three hours of recording to build a voice.