Title :
A scheme of syllable duration prediction and F0-contour generation to synthesize Chinese speech
Author :
Feng, Wei ; Xu, Yunbiao ; Zhao, Li ; Niimi, Yasuhisa
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Radio Eng., Southeast Univ., Nanjing, China
Abstract :
20125 syllable-timing data have been investigated to get their mean syllable durations and their initial/final timing structure. To calculate the actual duration of a syllable with different tones based on its mean duration, tone coefficient /spl lambda//sub j/ (equal to 0.849, 0.901, 0.908, 0.905, 0.897 for tone0, tone1, tone2, tone3, tone4 respectively) has been proposed. The calculation result showed that the relative length error of the proposed syllable duration method is 17.67%. An F0-contour generation approach to simulate the prosodic feature of a declarative sentence is also proposed in this paper. The preliminary hearing test showed that the intelligibility and the naturalness of synthetic speech were improved and achieved "good" level.
Keywords :
speech synthesis; Chinese speech synthesize; F0 contour generation; hearing test; prosodic feature; relative length error; syllable duration prediction; syllable timing data; synthetic speech; tone coefficient; Auditory system; Data engineering; Data mining; Databases; Information science; Predictive models; Speech synthesis; Synthesizers; Testing; Timing;
Conference_Titel :
Neural Networks and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Nanjing
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-7702-8
DOI :
10.1109/ICNNSP.2003.1280745
