The issue of representing speech rhythm is understood in this paper as the search for relevant primary parameters that will allow the formalisation of speech rhythm. Current speech synthesisers show that phonological models are not satisfactory with respect to the modelling of speech rhythmicity. Our analysis indicates that this may be in part related to the formalisation of rhythmic representa...

This paper describes the results of a joint study on the applicability of the command-response model to F0 contours of European Portuguese, with an aim to use it in a TTS system. Analysis-by-Synthesis of observed F0 contours of a number of utterances by five native speakers indicated that the model with provisions for both positive and negative accent commands applies quite well to all the utte...

Proper early acquisition of speech and language appears to be a necessary process to reach mature speech communication. In modelling the process of natural (and pathological) speech production and speech perception, we frequently concentrate on specific aspects of phonetic knowledge. But also to improve the performance of speech technological systems, an intelligent interpretation of the abunda...

This paper describes the processing of 2465 sentences (or utterences) which are collected by phonetical rules from a big corpus--recent years' newspaper, "People's Daily" and etc., as materials of speech recognition and speech synthesis database. In these sentences, both phonetic phenomena and sentence patterns are included. We first consider the phonetic distribution among syllables: inter-syl...

1 Background .................................................................................................................................1 1 Visible speech synthesis .........................................................................................................2 2 Illustrative experiment of evaluation testing ..........................................................................

Given that state of the art speech synthesis systems have already reached a high naturalness level, it is time to move to talking speech from the actual read speech framework. For this purpose it is thus necessary to investigate how disfluencies can be included in speech synthesis and even increase its naturalness. This paper builds on a previously presented work and focuses on finding a local ...

This paper presents an interactive tool for working with parametric speech synthesis. The tool facilitates editing of parameter tracks, and it provides real-time feedback of the synthesised speech. It serves as an interface to KTH’s multilingual rule based synthesis system, and can be used to control a formant synthesiser as well as a 3-D “talking head”. The tool has been used in research and e...

A method was developed to adapt prosody to a new speaker/style in speech synthesis. It is based on predicting differences between target and original speakers/styles and applying them to the original one. Differences in fundamental frequency (F0) contours are represented in the framework of the generation process model; differences in the command magnitudes/amplitudes. While the original one re...

A new approach is described which estimates vocal tract shape sequences for speech consisting of voiceless speech and periods of silence as well as voiced speech. This method, based on the use of articulatory codebooks, has proved successful in identifying the place position of stops and fricatives. Secondly, we focus on voiced speech in particular. A fast analysisby-synthesis scheme, which giv...

Can we make a difference? If I had a pound for every time I have heard someone tell us that we can make a difference I think I could personally end world poverty. I have a copy of a cartoon in which someone says, ‘What difference can one person make?’ In the next frame two or three more speech bubbles have appeared asking the same question. In the final frame there are a plethora of similar spe...