Modeling Pause-Duration for Style-Specific Speech Synthesis

A major contribution to speaking style comes from both the location of phrase breaks in an utterance, as well as the duration of these breaks. This paper is about modeling the duration of style specific breaks. We look at six styles of speech here. We present analysis that shows that these styles differ in the duration of pauses in natural speech. We have built CART models to predict the pause duration in these corpora and have integrated them into the Festival speech synthesis system. Our objective results show that if we have sufficient training data, we can build style specific models. Our subjective tests show that people can perceive the difference between different models and that they prefer style specific models over simple pause duration models.