The Cost258 Signal Generation Test Array

The evaluation of Speech Synthesis Coders (SSC) provided in the literature is often informal and results cannot be compared. The COST258 signal generation test array aims to provide a benchmark for testing the ability and performance of SSC in achieving different prosodic modifications. The benchmark consists in performing various prosodic transplantations from a given natural utterance to various prosodic "variants" of the same sentence. These prosodic "variants" were recorded by the same speaker in order to obtain both credible prosodic transplantations and reference target signals. 1. INTRODUCTION Speech synthesis systems aim at computing signals from a symbolic input ranging from a simple raw text to more structured documents, including abstract linguistic or phonological representations such as are available in a concept-to-speech system. Various representations of the desired utterance are built during processing. All these speech synthesis systems however use at least a module..