Application of Voice Gender Conversion (VGC) to Speech
Compression in Mobile Communications

Abstract
The bulk of information transmitted via mobile communications channels is speech.
As a type of signal speech is very compressible and speech-encoding systems go to
great lengths to remove as much redundancy as possible before transmission, while
still preserving the message content and speaker characteristics of the signal.
Increases in the numbers of users as well as the services provided mean that
communications channels become busier all the time and it is worth investigating new
ways of achieving speech compression.
VGC is the ability to alter the perceived gender of a speech signal so that the speech
of one gender can be made to sound like that of the other gender or made to sound
like some interim gender neither definitely male or female.
A VGC process based on a time-scale modification algorithm, is presented here as a
means of further improving the speech compression ratio of an existing mobile
communications codec (specifically the GSM-06.10 Speech Codec).