A novel lip movement model related to speech rate is proposed in this paper. The model is constructed based on the research results on the viscoelasticity of skin-muscle tissue and the quantitative relationship between lip muscle force and speech rate. In order to show the validity of the model, we have applied it to our Chinese speech animation system. The experimental results show that our sy...

This paper provides an improved codebook-based speech enhancement method using multi-band excitation (MBE) model. It aims to remove the noise between the harmonics, which may exist in codebook-based enhanced speech. In general, the proposed system is based on analysis-withsynthesis (AwS) framework. During the analysis stage, acoustic features are extracted including pitch, harmonic magnitude an...

Trill is one of the most difficult sound for speech synthesis due to the complexity of the speech signal. The problem need to be addressed since it is a popular sound in world's languages. Several languages in the multi-language text-to-speech system of Bell Laboratories have this sound in the inventory. This paper reports a simple method that greatly improve the quality of trill for the Italia...

The speech synthesizer can be used as an electronic rehabilitation device for the speech disabled people. To obtain the highly desirable individual voice, an appropriate speech sample database has to be collected. This paper presents a simple method of determining the voice similarity by analyzing a set of very short sounds. It can be used to shorten the time needed for database collection by s...

Concatenative synthesis is currently the favoured approach to text-to-speech synthesis, yet it has fundamental limitations. In the longer-term, articulatory synthesis has much greater potential. Different approaches to articulatory synthesis are discussed in terms of the choices made concerning the articulatory processes modelled, the simplifying assumptions, and the data collected.

Seeing the talker’s articulatory mouth movements can influence the auditory speech percept both in speech identification and detection tasks. Here we show that these audiovisual integration effects also occur for sine wave speech (SWS), which is an impoverished speech signal that naïve observers often fail to perceive as speech. While audiovisual integration in the identification task only occu...

Pitch model is very important for speech synthesis, and it mainly describes the variation of pitch. The models that are now being used in Chinese speech synthesis are described qualitatively and with low precision. We try to find the pitch model from actual speech samples by data mining. A prototype called SpeechDM has been implemented to learn the pattern of the pitch variation in Chinese two-...

This paper presents an automatic speech segmentation method based on HMM alignment and a categorized multiple-expert fine adjustment. The accuracy of syllable boundaries is significantly improved (72.8% and 51.9% for starting and ending boundaries of syllables, respectively) after the fine adjustment. Moreover, a novel phonetic verification method for checking inconsistency between text script ...

This paper describes the realization of a corpus-based Chinese speech synthesis system, including the corpus design and unit selection procedure. The system selects the synthesis unit according to context similarity between target unit and candidate unit. Neither prosody parameter prediction nor prosody feature modification is needed. The informal test shows that the synthesized speech is quite...

In this paper, we present a new syllabification algorithm for Malay language. Syllabification is the process to extract or divide syllable from words. Syllabification process is language dependent where each language can have its own set of syllable structure. Syllabication is an important component in speech synthesizer, speech recognition and transliteration system. Syllabification algorithms...