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...

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...

Speech animation synthesis is still a challenging topic in the field of computer graphics. Despite many challenges, representing detailed appearance of inner mouth such as nipping tongue’s tip with teeth and tongue’s back hasn’t been achieved in the resulting animation. To solve this problem, we propose a method of data-driven speech animation synthesis especially when focusing on the inside of...

This paper describes CU VOCAL, a Chinese text-to-speech synthesis system that adopts the approach of corpus-based syllable concatenation. We have demonstrated the applicability of the approach primarily for Cantonese, a major dialect of Chinese predominant in Hong Kong, South China and many overseas Chinese communities. This work extends our previous work as described in [1]. Our approach is ab...

Like many current TTS systems the AT&T German text -tospeech system is based on the methods of unit selection and concatenative synthesis [1]. This paper highlights efforts to improve TTS quality by closely matching the speakers' original productions with linguistic descriptions. On the segmental level this is achieved by adjusting the speakers' individual productions to an established, general...