Articulatory Speech Re-synthesis: Profiting from Natural Acoustic Speech Data

The quality of static phones (e.g. vowels, fricatives, nasals, laterals) generated by articulatory speech synthesizers has reached a high level in the last years. Our goal is to expand this high quality to dynamic speech, i.e. whole syllables, words, and utterances by re-synthesizing natural acoustic speech data. Re-synthesis means that vocal tract action units or articulatory gestures, describing the succession of speech movements, are adapted spatio-temporally with respect to a natural speech signal produced by a natural “model speaker” of Standard German. This adaptation is performed using the software tool SAGA (Sound and Articulatory Gesture Alignment) that is currently under development in our lab. The resulting action unit scores are stored in a database and serve as input for our articulatory speech synthesizer. This technique is designed to be the basis for a unit selection articulatory speech synthesis in the future.