One crucial point of concatenation approaches using diphones is to handle the discontinuities between the concatenated units. This problem is treated by a suitable analysis of the diphones for a parametric synthesis. The model of the parametric synthesis is the lossy tube model, which is an extension of the standard lattice filter considering frequency dependent vocal tract losses. The paramete...

This paper investigates interactions between audio and visual cues to friendliness in questions in two perception experiments. In the first experiment, manually edited parametric audio-visual synthesis was used to create the stimuli. Results were consistent with earlier findings in that a late, high final focal accent peak was perceived as friendlier than an earlier, lower focal accent peak. Fr...

In this paper, we describe a statistical parametric speech synthesis approach with unit-level acoustic representation. In conventional deep neural network based speech synthesis, the input text features are repeated for the entire duration of phoneme for mapping text and speech parameters. This mapping is learnt at the frame-level which is the de-facto acoustic representation. However much of t...

Speech synthesis based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and other statistical parametric techniques have been a hot topic for some time. Using this techniques, speech synthesizers are able to produce intelligible and flexible voices. Despite progress, the quality of the voices produced using statistical parametric synthesis has not yet reached the level of the current predominant unit-selection ap...

This paper introduces the speech synthesis system developed by USTC for Blizzard Challenge 2014. Six Indian languages were evaluated this year, including Assamese, Gujarati, Hindi, Rajasthani, Tamil and Telugu. Two tasks were built for these languages: the mono-lingual task (IH1 hub task) and the multi-lingual task (IH2 spoken task). We submitted entries to both tasks in all languages. We submi...