Patent ID: 8036899

Claim:
A speech affect processing system to enable a user to edit an affect content of a speech signal, the system comprising: input to receive speech analysis data from a speech analysis system, said speech analysis data comprising a set of parameters representing said speech signal; a user input to receive user input data defining one or more affect-related operations to be performed on said speech signal; an affect modification system coupled to said user input and to said speech processing system to modify said parameters in accordance with said one or more affect-related operations and further comprising a speech reconstruction system to reconstruct an affect modified speech signal from said modified parameters; and an output coupled to said affect modification system to output said affect modified speech signal; wherein said user input is configured to enable a user to define an emotional content of said modified speech signal, wherein said parameters include at least one metric of a degree of harmonic content of said speech signal, and wherein said affect related operations include an operation to modify said degree of harmonic content in accordance with said defined emotional content.