Manipulating Speech Pitch Periods According to Optimal Insertion/Deletion Position in Residual Signal for Intonation Control in Speech Synthesis

ICSLP2000: the 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing, October 16-20, 2000, Beijing, China.This paper describes the investigation of manipulating positions in a speech pitch when lengthening or shortening the pitch period, that is, lowering or raising fundamental frequency of speech. The experimental results revealed that the preferable positions were at the first half of the pitch period for pitch shortening, and at the second half of it for pitch lengthening. The findings are expected to improve the quality of speech synthesis on pitch modulation

Using Start/End Timings of Spectral Transitions Between Phonemes in Concatenative Speech Synthesis

ICSLP2002: the 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing , September 16-20, 2002, Denver, Colorado, USA.The definition of "phoneme boundary timing" in a speech corpus affects the quality of concatenative speech synthesis systems. For example, if the selected speech unit is not appropriately match to the speech unit of the required phoneme environment, the quality may be degraded. In this paper, a dynamic segment boundary defi- nition is proposed. In the definition, the concatenation point is chosen from the start or end timings of spectral transition depending on the phoneme environment at the boundaries. For a listening test to compare the naturalness of conventional/proposed methods, 100 Japanese place names were selected randomly and synthesized. The ratio of naturalness was 1 to 3.3 (conventional v.s. proposed) by four subjects