Expressive text-to-speech approaches

The core concern of this paper is the modelling and the tractability of expressiveness in natural voice synthesis. In the first part we quickly discuss the imponderable gap between natural and singing voice synthesis approaches. In the second part we outline a four level model and a corpus-based methodology in modelling expressive forms—an essential step towards expressive voice synthesis. We then try to contrast them with recurrent concerns in singing voice synthesis. We finally undertake a first reflection about a possible transposition of the approach to singing voice. We conclude with some program considerations in Research and Development for the singing voice synthesis, inspired from natural voice synthesis techniques.