The Breath Segment in Expressive Speech

This paper, based on a selected one hour of expressive speech, is a pilot study on how to use breath segments to get more natural and expressive speech. It mainly deals with the status of when the breath segments occur and how the acoustic features are affected by the speaker ’s emotional states in terms of valence and activation. Statistical analysis is made to investigate the relationship between the length and intensity of the breath segments and the two state parameters. Finally, a perceptual experiment is conducted by employing the analysis results to synthesized speech, the results of which demonstrate that breath segment insertion can help improve the expressiveness and naturalness of the synthesized speech.