Reducing Audible Spectral Discontinuities

In this paper, a common problem in diphone synthesis is discussed, viz., the occurrence of audible discontinuities at diphone boundaries. Informal observations show that spectral mismatch is most likely the cause of this phenomenon.We first set out to find an objective spectral measure for discontinuity. To this end, several spectral distance measures are related to the results of a listening experiment. Then, we studied the feasibility of extending the diphone database with context-sensitive diphones to reduce the occurrence of audible discontinuities. The number of additional diphones is limited by clustering consonant contexts that have a similar effect on the surrounding vowels on the basis of the best performing distance measure. A listening experiment has shown that the addition of these context-sensitive diphones significantly reduces the amount of audible discontinuities

Voice morphing using the generative topographic mapping

In this paper we address the problem of Voice Morphing. We attempt to transform the spectral characteristics of a source speaker's speech signal so that the listener would believe that the speech was uttered by a target speaker. The voice morphing system transforms the spectral envelope as represented by a Linear Prediction model. The transformation is achieved by codebook mapping using the Generative Topographic Mapping, a non-linear, latent variable, parametrically constrained, Gaussian Mixture Model

Effect of a Herringbone Mesostructure on the Electromechanical Properties of Piezofiber Composites for Energy Harvesting Applications

Piezoelectric materials are often used in energy harvesting devices that convert the waste mechanical energy into effective electrical energy. Polymer-based piezoelectric composites appear to be promising candidates for use in these devices, as they offer a number of advantages, such as sufficient flexibility and environmental compatibility. However, a major drawback associated with these composites may be that their effective electromechanical properties are usually weaker than those of the piezoelectric constituents used in them. In this paper, we propose a class of polymeric-based piezoelectric composites with a laminated mesostructure that offer improved electromechanical properties over unidirectional piezofiber composites and can even possess stronger electromechanical properties than their piezoelectric constituents for certain modes of operation. We present examples of enhanced properties of these composites including effective piezoelectric charge and voltage coefficients, as well as effective electromechanical coupling factors for two-dimensional operation modes. We conduct an optimization to identify the optimal microstructure for the highest values of the coupling coefficients within this class of composites. Our findings demonstrate the potential in designing piezoelectric composites with a hierarchical structure to achieve significantly amplified electromechanical properties for energy harvesting applications.Physic