In this paper, we first provide a review of the state-of-the-art emotional voice conversion research, and the existing emotional speech databases. We then motivate the development of a novel emotional speech database (ESD) that addresses the increasing research need. With this paper, the ESD database is now made available to the research community. The ESD database consists of 350 parallel utterances spoken by 10 native English and 10 native Chinese speakers and covers 5 emotion categories (neutral, happy, angry, sad and surprise). More than 29 hours of speech data were recorded in a controlled acoustic environment. The database is suitable for multi-speaker and cross-lingual emotional voice conversion studies. As case studies, we implement several state-of-the-art emotional voice conversion systems on the ESD database. This paper provides a reference study on ESD in conjunction with its release.

翻译：在本文中,我们首先回顾最先进的情感语音转换研究和现有的情感言语数据库。然后我们鼓励开发新的情感言语数据库,以满足不断增长的研究需求。有了这份文件,教育言语数据库现在可供研究界使用。教育言语数据库由10个母语英语和10个母语中国语的350个平行话句组成,涵盖5个情感类别(中性、快乐、愤怒、悲伤和惊讶)。在受控制的音响环境中记录了超过29小时的言语数据。该数据库适合于多语和跨语言的情感言语转换研究。作为案例研究,我们在教育言语数据库中实施了若干最先进的情感语音转换系统。本文在发布该数据库的同时,还提供了关于教育言语转换的参考研究。