We present an iterative algorithm for automatic feature selection and weight tuning of target cost in the context of unit selection based audio-visual speech synthesis. We perform feature selection and weight tuning for a given unit-selection corpus to make the ranking given by the target cost function consistent with the ordering given by an objective dissimilarity measure. We explicitly perfo...

This paper describes a method for text-to-speech waveform synthesis based on the Analysis-by-Synthesis/Overlap-Add (ABS/OLA) sinusoidal model. This model has been shown in previous work to be a useful framework for pitch and time-scale modi cation of both speech and music signals. This paper explores some extensions of the original ABS/OLA formulation that attempt to overcome speci c artifacts,...

In this paper we examine a method for separating out the vocal-tract filter response from the voice source characteristic using a large articulatory database. The method realises such separation for voiced speech using an iterative approximation procedure under the assumption that the speech production process is a linear system composed of a voice source and a vocal-tract filter, and that each...

A state-of-the-art 1D acoustic synthesizer has been previously developed, and coupled to speaker-specific biomechanical models of oropharynx in ArtiSynth. As expected, the formant frequencies of the synthesized vowel sounds were shown to be different from those of the recorded audio. Such discrepancy was hypothesized to be due to the simplified geometry of the vocal tract model as well as the o...

This study investigates whether automatic transcription procedures can approximate manual phonetic transcriptions typically delivered with contemporary large speech corpora. We used ten automatic procedures to generate a broad phonetic transcription of well-prepared speech (read-aloud texts) and spontaneous speech (telephone dialogues). The resulting transcriptions were compared to manually ver...

A well known problem in unit selection speech synthesis is designing the join and target function sub-costs and optimizing their corresponding weights so that they reflect the human listeners’ preferences. To achieve this we propose a procedure where an objective criterion for optimal speech unit selection is used. The objective criterion for tuning the cost function weights is based on automat...

This paper presents a novel statistical sample-based approach for Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based Voice Conversion (VC). Although GMM-based VC has the promising flexibility of model adaptation, quality in converted speech is significantly worse than that of natural speech. This paper addresses the problem of inaccurate modeling, which is one of the main reasons causing the quality degradatio...

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...

In our fully automatic corpus-based method of generating fundamental frequency (F0) contours for emotional speech synthesis, an improvement was realized related to the process of corpus preparation. The method assumes the generation process model and predicts its command parameters using binary regression trees with inputs of linguistic information of the sentence to be synthesized. Because of ...