Modification of speech: a tribute to Mike Macon

The paper provides an overview of, and puts in perspective, the contributions of Mike Macon to text-to-speech synthesis (TTS). The core of his work consists of signal processing algorithms that modify speech. The paper argues that major opportunities exist for TTS systems that modify the prosody of acoustic units, instead of searching for units having the required prosody. However, the challenges to making prosodic modification based systems sound more natural are formidable. The paper provides an overview of the several projects aimed at these challenges, and in which Macon played a role.