Improving intelligibility of synthesized speech in noise with emphasized prosody
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2010/03/0041/000161Keywords:
TTS, speech synthesis, linear prediction, prosody, noisy speechAbstract
The performance of current high quality concatenative text-to-speech (TTS) systems is limited under noisy environments. This paper investigates whether or not the intelligibility of synthesized speech in noise can be improved by emphasizing the prosody. Additionally, the paper presents a method that can effectively emphasize the prosody of units in existing TTS databases. The circular linear prediction (CLP) model is combined with the constant-pitch transform (CPT) to perform pitch and duration modifications to concatenative TTS units with little impact to the subjective quality. Test utterances are generated using the method and compared to reference utterances synthesized by a high quality TTS engine. The subjective test results demonstrate a preference for emphasized prosody in the majority of the test cases.
References
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Copyright (c) 2010 Sunil R. Shukla (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
