A novel set of synthesis units with stable spectral boundaries for HMM-based Mandarin speech synthesis system

DOI

10.2991/icmt-13.2013.19How to use a DOI?

Keywords

synthesis unit·co-articulation·maximum spectral stability criterion· Mandarin speech·HTS

Abstract

Co-articulation is a common phenomenon in human speech, which guarantees the speech sound coherent and natural. Synthesized speech, however, often sounds artificial. This is somewhat because of its inability to imitate co-articulation well. This paper defines a novel set of synthesis units to preserve both intra- and inter-syllable co-articulation. The boundaries of the new unit are located respectively at each essential vowel of two adjacent syllables. It consists of three parts: final-tail of the preceding syllable, initial consonant and final-head of the following syllable so that we call it Nal-Initial-FI (NIF) unit. To locate the boundaries, we adopt the maximum spectral stability criterion. It can find out the most stable point within the essential vowel. In the experiment, we test NIF units on the HMM-based speech synthesis system (HTS) and compare the result to the syllable unit system. The Preference test and the Comparison Category Rating (CCR) test show that the speech synthesized with NIF units has better naturalness than that with syllable units, and the speech quality of both systems is comparable.

Copyright

© 2013, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiao Yishan
AU  - Xie Xiang
AU  - Tu Ming
AU  - Na Xingyu
AU  - Wang Jing
PY  - 2013/11
DA  - 2013/11
TI  - A novel set of synthesis units with stable spectral boundaries for HMM-based Mandarin speech synthesis system
BT  - Proceedings of 3rd International Conference on Multimedia Technology(ICMT-13)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 151
EP  - 158
SN  - 1951-6851
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icmt-13.2013.19
DO  - 10.2991/icmt-13.2013.19
ID  - Yishan2013/11
ER  -