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 1 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 …