Concatenating units of natural speech is one method of speech synthesis. Most such systems use an inventory of xed length units, typically diphones or triphones with one instance of each type. An alternative is to use more varied, non-uniform units extracted from large speech databases containing multiple instances of each. The greater variability in such natural speech segments allows closer m...

This paper describes the first Text-to-Speech (TTS) system for the Mongolian language, using the general speech synthesis architecture of Festival. The TTS is based on diphone concatenative synthesis, applying TD-PSOLA technique. The conversion process from input text into acoustic waveform is performed in a number of steps consisting of functional components. Procedures and functions for the s...

The aim of our study was to investigate whether children distinguish between ‘new’ and ‘given’ information via phonetic reduction in spontaneous speech in a similar way to adults. An interactive ‘spot the difference’ game was used to elicit spontaneous speech. Word duration, fundamental frequency and vowel formant frequencies in repeated content words relative to when they were mentioned for th...

Speech animation synthesis is still a challenging topic in the field of computer graphics. Despite many challenges, representing detailed appearance of inner mouth such as nipping tongue’s tip with teeth and tongue’s back hasn’t been achieved in the resulting animation. To solve this problem, we propose a method of data-driven speech animation synthesis especially when focusing on the inside of...

A novel constrained texture synthesis approach is proposed to enhance the visual quality of a degraded image by reconstructing its high frequency texture content. In low-bit-rate image and video compression and communication systems, high frequency transformed coefficients are often lost due to aggressive quantization or un-even error protection schemes. However, with the block-based encoding a...

We present an initial study on how to model smiled speech with an articulatory speech synthesizer, led by the research question as to what cues are responsible for the effect of an audible distinction of smiled vs. non-smiled speech. In a perception test, we explore the relative contributions of i) spreading of the lips, ii) raising of the larynx, and iii) raising of the fundamental frequency. ...

This paper describes CU VOCAL, a Chinese text-to-speech synthesis system that adopts the approach of corpus-based syllable concatenation. We have demonstrated the applicability of the approach primarily for Cantonese, a major dialect of Chinese predominant in Hong Kong, South China and many overseas Chinese communities. This work extends our previous work as described in [1]. Our approach is ab...

In Japanese conversations, rise-fall intonation with vowel lengthening often occurs on the final syllable of a phrase. This phrase-final rise-fall (PFRF) is a new type of intonation first reported in the 1960’s. Researchers consider PFRF intonation a discourse marker which functions to sharpen the phrase boundary and retain the utterance turn, but other phrase-final intonation such as phrase-fi...

Solid-phase chemistry, photolabile protecting groups, and photolithography have been combined to achieve light-directed, spatially addressable parallel chemical synthesis to yield a highly diverse set of chemical products. Binary masking, one of many possible combinatorial synthesis strategies, yields 2n compounds in n chemical steps. An array of 1024 peptides was synthesized in ten steps, and ...

In this paper, a high-quality concatenative synthesis system using the deterministic plus stochastic model of speech is described, in which the prosodic modifications are performed by means of very simple and efficient operations, as we reported in a previous work [11]. In particular, pitchsynchrony is not necessary, and linear interpolations substitute other types of estimation. The method for...