This paper presents a methodology for articulatory synthesis of running speech in American English driven by real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) mid-sagittal vocal-tract data. At the core of the methodology is a time-domain simulation of the propagation of sound in the vocal tract developed previously by Maeda. The first step of the methodology is the automatic derivation of air-tissue...

A new articulatory synthesizer (SAPWindows), with a modular and flexible design, is described. A comprehensive acoustic model and a new interactive glottal source were implemented. Perceptual tests and simulations made possible by the synthesizer contributed to deepen our knowledge of one of the most important characteristics of European Portuguese, the nasal vowels. First attempts at incorpora...

Verbmobil is a speaker-independent system that offers translation assistance in dialogue situations. In co-operation with other institutes we are developing the speech synthesis module within Verbmobil for German and American English. Current priority is given to an enhancement of naturalness of our PSOLA based concatenative synthesis of German. Due to a tight schedule we investigated alternati...

We report on research in which we increased the degree of spectral control in concatenative synthesis by controlling the formant frequencies of the synthetic speech, as well as the energies in four spectral bands. In addition, we eliminated “points” of concatenation in favor of “regions” of concatenation, by crossfading between the end and the beginning of two speech segments that are part of a...

Concatenative synthesis can produce high-quality speech but is limited to the allophonic variations and voice types that were captured in the database. It would be desirable to modify speech units to remove formant discontinuities and to create new speaking styles, such as hypoor hyper-articulated speech. Unfortunately, manipulating the spectral structure often leads to degraded speech quality....

This study is aimed at developing view synthesis system for closed sections such as Tunnel, Bridge etc. to monitor and track the vehicle movement. For this purpose, video storage and synthesis systems were developed and demonstrated, making use of the video taken and stored in 4 web cameras. Consequently original technology has been secured but for commercialization, application to the sites wi...

Accurate estimation of segmental durations is crucial for naturalsounding text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This paper presents a model of segmental duration used in the Bell Labs Japanese TTS system. We describe the constraints on vowel devoicing, and effects of factors such as phone identity, surrounding phone identities, accentuation, syllabic structure, and phrasal position on the duration of...

In this paper we present an overview of the German version of the Bell Labs text-to-speech system, a high-quality concatenative synthesis system with extensive text analysis capabilities. We discuss problems of text analysis, and our solutions to these problems, including: the integration of text normalization tasks into linguistic text analysis; the capability to morphologically analyze compou...

We are presenting an interactive course on speech synthesis which is designed to support the education in speech communication. In the basic section, the fundamental principles of speech synthesis are explained. From this section, the user may select different branches which are explaining special topics in more detail. Two special sections are worked out until now: The first one is devoted to ...

The transformation of constructive program synthesis proofs is discussed and compared w i t h the more t radi t ional approaches to program transformation. An example system for adapting programs to special situations by transforming constructive synthesis proofs has been reconstructed and is compared w i th the original implementat ion [Goad, 1980b, Goad, 1980a]. A brief account of more genera...