| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/R94688/01 |
| Title: |
Concatenative speech synthesis using articulatory information |
| Principal Investigator: |
King, Professor S |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Project Partners: |
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| Department: |
Centre for Speech Technology Research |
| Organisation: |
University of Edinburgh |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
01 July 2002 |
Ends: |
30 June 2005 |
Value (£): |
181,097
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Human Communication in ICT |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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Concatenative methods are the state-of-the-art for speech synthesis. Recently, unit selection has proved to be the next step in concatenative synthesis. Unit selection requires a method for selecting the unit sequence to be used to synthesise a target phone sequence. This is usually found by a Viterbi search constrainec by measures of unit-to-target mismatch (in terms of pitch, duration, phonemic context) and join cost (typically consisting of purely spectral measures, such as a Euclidean distance in line spectral frequency (LSF) space). Additionally, the speech spectrum around joins must be smoothed to disguise the discontinuity (typically by interpolating either LSFs or linear prediction coefficients).We propose that computing join cost and smoothing the join should be performed using a single underlying representation of the speech signal. This project will determine what this representation should be. Our initial experiments will use articulatory parameters as the underlying representation; we will then extend the work to automatically determine the underlying representation. The method will be implemented and evaluated using the Festival system; therefore, we will also distribute the resulting software freely as part of Festival.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.ed.ac.uk |