In this work we propose and verify a hypothesis on emotional speech production: emotions induce physical and physiological changes in the whole body including changes in the configuration and physical/mechanical properties of the speech organs, regardless of whether or not the person is speaking, and as a side effect, this changes the voice quality. To verify this hypothesis, we measured the co...

The present study explored the intensity level of authorial voice in relation to the quality of argumentative writing. 42 undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language (36 girls and 6 boys) spent 45 minutes to individually complete in-class position-taking writing tasks for three weeks. Their overall academic writing quality scores assigned based on portfolio assessment were studied i...

In an HMM-based Text-To-Speech system, contextual features, including phonetic and prosodic factors have a significant influence to the spectrum, F0 and duration of the synthetic voice. This paper proposes prosodic features aiming at improving the naturalness of an HMM-based TTS system (VTed) for a tonal language, Vietnamese. The ToBI (Tones and Break Indices) features are used to learn two cru...

Voice conversion techniques attempt to modify speech signal so that it is perceived as if spoken by another speaker, different from the original speaker. In this paper, we present a novel approach to perform voice conversion. Our approach uses acoustic models based on units of speech, like phones and diphones, for voice conversion. These models can be computed and used independently for a given...

conclusions significant difference in the fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer, silence duration, friction duration, vocalization duration, and vocal cords contact quality index between the two groups was observed (p < 0.01). results the mean of fundamental frequency for the hearing loss children and the control group were 323.04 hz and 267.53 hz, jitter 10.05% and 1.52%, shimmer 17.24 and 5....

A significant part of the work required to create a high quality speech synthesizer is the creation of “synthetic voices”. Reusing an existing voice database and making it sound like a different speaker, or like the same speaker in a different emotional state, or using a different speaking style, is obviously important for increasing the efficiency in creating voice options for a synthesizer. T...

Pathological speech usually refers to the condition of speech distortion resulting from atypicalities in voice and/or in the articulatory mechanisms owing to disease, illness or other physical or biological insult to the production system. Although automatic evaluation of speech intelligibility and quality could come in handy in these scenarios to assist experts in diagnosis and treatment desig...

This paper describes novel voice quality control of synthetic speech using cluster adaptive training (CAT). In this method, we model voice quality factors labeled with perceptual expressions such as “Gender,” “Age” and “Brightness.” In advance, we obtain the intensity scores of the perceptual expressions by conducting a listening test, which evaluates differences of voice qualities between synt...