In this paper, we present a new speech synthesis method for improving voice quality in parametric rule-based speech synthesis systems. We also describe the results of a preference test on speech wave reconstruction to con rm the performance of the proposed method. The method is based on the functional approximation of vocal tract resonance produced by nonlinear interaction between the glottis a...

This paper focuses on generation of expressive speech, specifically speech displaying vocal affect. Generating speech with vocal affect is important for diagnosis, research, and remediation for children with autism and developmental language disorders. However, because vocal affect involves many acoustic factors working together in complex ways, it is unlikely that we will be able to generate c...

A great challenge for text-to-speech synthesis is to produce expressive speech. The main problem is that it is difficult to synthesise high-quality speech using expressive corpora. With the increasing interest in audiobook corpora for speech synthesis, there is a demand to synthesise speech which is rich in prosody, emotions and voice styles. In this work, Self-Organising Feature Maps (SOFM) ar...

Speech synthesis has been applied in many kinds of practical applications. Currently, state-of-the-art speech synthesis uses statistical methods based on hidden Markov model (HMM). Speech synthesized by statistical methods can be considered over-smooth caused by the averaging in statistical processing. In the literature, there have been many studies attempting to solve over-smoothness in speech...

NHK STRL 10 Speech synthesis is a very convenient means of conveying spoken information without the need for human labor. The most commonly used method of speech synthesis in program production compiles speech recorded during different tasks. Additionally, the textto-speech (TTS) synthesis, which can synthesize speech from any text, can be used to deal with dialogue spoken with unemotional or u...

© 2009 Seungho Han et al. 457 ABSTRACT⎯The optimum maximum voiced frequency (MVF) estimation-based two-band excitation for hidden Markov model-based speech synthesis is presented. An analysis-by-synthesis scheme is adopted for the MVF estimation which leads to the minimum spectral distortion of synthesized speech. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves synthet...

In this paper, we propose a new method for low bit rate speech coding using a nomogram that is a pair of codebooks representing the functional relationship between formant frequencies and articulatory parameters. Significant features of our approach are 1) using the codebooks derived theoretically from the computation using a stylized vocal tract model and 2) independent coding by separating fr...

This paper presents a method for speech analysis/synthesis/ conversion by using sequential processing. The aims of this method are to improve the quality of synthesized speech and to convert the original speech into another speech of different characteristics. We apply the Kalman Filter for estimating the auto-regressive coefficients of ‘time varying AR model with unknown input (ARUI model)’, w...

The performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) system can be significantly enhanced with additional information from visual speech elements such as the movement of lips, tongue, and teeth, especially under noisy environment. In this paper, a novel approach for recognition of visual speech elements is presented. The approach makes use of adaptive boosting (AdaBoost) and hidden Markov mode...

This paper describes a new automatic pitch-marking method using wavelet transform. This method detects discontinuity in the speech waveform which occurs at the glottal closure instant (GCI). A time domain prosodic modification technique requires an appropriate determination of the synthesis pitch-marks. We evaluated the performance of the newly developed pitchmarking method by using our interna...