A new articulatory synthesizer (SAPWindows), with a modular and flexible design, is described. A comprehensive acoustic model and a new interactive glottal source were implemented. Perceptual tests and simulations made possible by the synthesizer contributed to deepen our knowledge of one of the most important characteristics of European Portuguese, the nasal vowels. First attempts at incorpora...

This paper discusses two well-known phonetic-phonological phenomena of Japanese, vowel devoicing and mora-timed rhythm. Regarding vowel devoicing as a process of vowels getting consonantal, it may change the mora-templated syllable structures of Japanese, resulting in the deviation from mora-timed rhythm. To investigate spontaneous Japanese with comparison to other languages, the label data of ...

Selectivity in the catalytic functionalization of complex molecules is a major challenge in chemical synthesis. The problem is magnified when there are several possible stereochemical outcomes and when similar functional groups occur repeatedly within the same molecule. Selective polyene oxidation provides an archetypical example of this challenge. Historically, enzymatic catalysis has provided...

Verbmobil is a speaker-independent system that offers translation assistance in dialogue situations. In co-operation with other institutes we are developing the speech synthesis module within Verbmobil for German and American English. Current priority is given to an enhancement of naturalness of our PSOLA based concatenative synthesis of German. Due to a tight schedule we investigated alternati...

We report on research in which we increased the degree of spectral control in concatenative synthesis by controlling the formant frequencies of the synthetic speech, as well as the energies in four spectral bands. In addition, we eliminated “points” of concatenation in favor of “regions” of concatenation, by crossfading between the end and the beginning of two speech segments that are part of a...

Proteins have become accessible targets for chemical synthesis. The basic strategy is to use native chemical ligation, Staudinger ligation, or other orthogonal chemical reactions to couple synthetic peptides. The ligation reactions are compatible with a variety of solvents and proceed in solution or on a solid support. Chemical synthesis enables a level of control on protein composition that gr...

We are presenting an interactive course on speech synthesis which is designed to support the education in speech communication. In the basic section, the fundamental principles of speech synthesis are explained. From this section, the user may select different branches which are explaining special topics in more detail. Two special sections are worked out until now: The first one is devoted to ...

The transformation of constructive program synthesis proofs is discussed and compared w i t h the more t radi t ional approaches to program transformation. An example system for adapting programs to special situations by transforming constructive synthesis proofs has been reconstructed and is compared w i th the original implementat ion [Goad, 1980b, Goad, 1980a]. A brief account of more genera...

The detection of deception in human speech is a difficult task but can be performed above chance level by human listeners even when only audio data is provided. Still, it is highly contested, which speech features could be used to help identify lies. In this study, we examined a set of phonetic and paralinguistic cues and their influence on the credibility of speech using an analysis-by-synthes...

Concatenative synthesis can produce high-quality speech but is limited to the allophonic variations and voice types that were captured in the database. It would be desirable to modify speech units to remove formant discontinuities and to create new speaking styles, such as hypoor hyper-articulated speech. Unfortunately, manipulating the spectral structure often leads to degraded speech quality....