Stress and Accent Transmission In HMM-Based Syllable-Context Very Low Bit Rate Speech Coding

Abstract In this paper, we propose a solution to reconstruct stress and accent contextual factors at the receiver of a very low bitrate speech codec built on recognition/synthesis architecture. In speech synthesis, accent and stress symbols are predicted from the text, which is not available at the receiver side of the speech codec. Therefore, speech signal-based symbols, generated as syllable-level log average F0 and energy acoustic measures, quantized using a scalar quantization, are used instead of accentual and stress symbols for HMM-based speech synthesis. Results from incremental real-time speech synthesis confirmed, that a combination of F0 and energy signal-based symbols can replace their counterparts of text-based binary accent and stress symbols developed for text-to-speech systems. The estimated transmission bit-rate overhead is about 14 bits/second per acoustic measure

Individual Differences in Speech Production and Perception

Inter-individual variation in speech is a topic of increasing interest both in human sciences and speech technology. It can yield important insights into biological, cognitive, communicative, and social aspects of language. Written by specialists in psycholinguistics, phonetics, speech development, speech perception and speech technology, this volume presents experimental and modeling studies that provide the reader with a deep understanding of interspeaker variability and its role in speech processing, speech development, and interspeaker interactions. It discusses how theoretical models take into account individual behavior, explains why interspeaker variability enriches speech communication, and summarizes the limitations of the use of speaker information in forensics