Integration of acoustic modeling and mel-cepstral analysis for HMM-based speech synthesis

In this paper, a novel approach for integrating acoustic modeling and mel-cepstral analysis is proposed. The aim of HMM-based speech synthesis is to model speech waveforms with a statistical model. However, the conventional techniques divide the modeling process into two steps: the frame by frame feature extraction step and the acoustic modeling step. Although it is reasonably effective, the deterioration of speech quality is caused by the divide of the objective function. In this paper, we propose an approach to modeling them as an integrative model and show the possibility of improving synthesized speech.