About me

Currently, I work at the Center of Advanced Sound Technologies of Yamaha Corporation. I was previously collaborating at the research staff of the Music Technology Group (MTG) from the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelone. I'm also PhD. candidate of the Analysis & Synthesis Team of the Institue for Music/Acoustic Research and Coordination (IRCAM) in Paris.

As academic background, I hold an Electronics and Communications Engeneering diploma by the Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UAG) and Master Degrees in Telecommunications by the CINVESTVAV-IPN and in Digital Systems and Signal Processing by the University of Rennes I. I'm currently attending the PhD. degree from the Pierre and Marie Curie University of Paris.

Research Interests

Spoken/Singing Voice Conversion

Modification of a source speaker voice to render perceptually similar to a particular target one. Application to high-quality speech/singing voice systems.

Spectral Envelope Modeling

Efficient estimation of the spectral envelope information by improved cepstral and autoregressive models and optimal selection of the model order based on the harmonic information.

Speech Synthesis

Signal-model based and concatenative speech techniques for speech modification and Text-To-Speech systems.

Speaker characterisation

Modelization of the individual characteristics of a speaker based on acoustical and prosodic features.

Publications

Actualized on Oct 6, 2009

Villavicencio, F., Maestre, E. (2010). Full-Quality Voice Conversion based on Mel-Frequency Scaling and Principal Components. Submitted to the IEEE's International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal processing, 2010 (ICASSP'10).

Villavicencio, F., Röbel, A., Rodet, X. (2010). On Improved Spectral Envelope Modeling and its Application to High-Quality Voice Conversion. Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (special issue in Voice Transformation).

Villavicencio, F., Röbel, A., Rodet, X. (2009). Applying Improved Spectral Envelope Modeling for High-Quality Voice Conversion. IEEE's International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal processing, 2009 (ICASSP'09).

Villavicencio, F., Röbel, A., Rodet, X. (2008). Extending Efficient Spectral Envelope Modeling to Mel-Frequency Based Representation. IEEE 2008 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal processing, 2008 (ICASSP'08). 1625-1628.

Villavicencio, F., Röbel, A., Rodet, X. (2007). All-Pole Spectral Envelope Modelling with Order Selection for Harmonic Signals . IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal processing, 2007 (ICASSP'07). 1, I-49 I-52.

Röbel, A., Villavicencio, F., Rodet, X. (2007). On Cepstral and All-Pole Based Spectral Envelope Modeling with Unknown Model Order. Pattern Recognition Letters. 28(11), 1343-1350.

Villavicencio, F., Röbel, A., Rodet, X. (2006). Improving LPC Spectral Envelope Extraction of Voiced Speech by True-Envelope Estimation. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2006 (ICASSP'06).