Manipulation of the prosodic features of vocal tract. The most recent software implementation asy provides a kinematic description of speech articulation in terms of the. Timothy bunnell, ying dou, prasanna kumar muthukumar, florian metze, daniel perry, tim polzehl, kishore prahallad, stefan steidl and callie vaughn. Model development and simulations1 mats bdvegdrd abstract the main focus of this thesis is a parameterised production model of an articulatory speech synthesiser. Section 5 discusses possible future work directions. Articulatory features for speechdriven head motion synthesis. The first official release has now been made, as of october 14th 2015. Effect of articulatory and acoustic features on the. Oct 19, 2016 bidirectional lstm networks employing stacked bottleneck features for expressive speech driven head motion synthesis. Asy was designed as a tool for studying the relationship between speech production and speech.
These events consist ofthe formation and release ofconstrictions in the vocal tract. Section 3 describes our approach, and section 4 presents our initial experiments and results. Her system was based on dectalk, a commercially available textto speech speech synthesizer that models the human articulatory tract. Speech driven head motion synthesis the outline of the proposed approach is depicted in figure 1. As a speech synthesis method it is not among the best, when the quality of produced speech sounds is the main criterion. Articulatory synthesis refers to computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of the human vocal tract and the articulation processes occurring there. Speech synthesis incorporating articulatory features into. The framework also provides an interface to articulatory animation synthesis, as well as an example application to illustrate its use with a 3d game engine.
Finally, the scope for the present work is given in sect. Unsupervised learning for expressive speech synthesis. With the aim of assessing the influence of emotions on articulatoryacoustic features in speech production, the current study explored the. Speech is created by digitally simulating the flow. In these scores, the articulatory gestures required to generate an utterance are specified and temporally coordinated. The goal of the project is to create the best speech synthesis software on the planet. In normal speech, the source sound is produced by the glottal folds, or voice box. Expressive synthetic speech pictures taken from paul ekman. Articulatory speech synthesis models the natural speech production process. Articulatory features mandarin detector performance categorized tens of phoneme changes into several confusing articulatory features category guanhua yue place 79. Most of the studies involving articulatory information have focused on effectively estimating them from speech, and few studies have actually used such features for speech recognition.
Gnuspeech is an extensible, texttospeech and language creation package, based on realtime, articulatory, speechsynthesisbyrules. Bidirectional lstm networks employing stacked bottleneck features for expressive speechdriven head motion synthesis. As a first step toward using articulatory inversion in speech modification, this article investigates the impact on synthesis quality of replacing measured articulators with predictions from. In 14, 15, the author develop a multispeaker inverse mapping system. Speech synthesis by articulatory models helmuth plonerbernard abstract this paper is supposed to deliver insights into the various aspects associated with the. Articulatory features for expressive speech synthesis alan w. Festival offers a general framework for building speech synthesis systems as. Deriving articulatory features once a codebook spanning the space of valid articulatory con. Expressive synthesized speech with respect to giving kismet the ability to generate emotive vocalizations, janet cahns work e. The software has been released as two tarballs that are available in the project. Currently, the most successful approach for speech generation in the commercial sector is concatenative synthesis. The ivectors are calculated using kaldi software, as by.
With the aim of assessing the influence of emotions on articulatory acoustic features in speech production, the current study explored the. Bidirectional lstm networks employing stacked bottleneck features for expressive speech driven head motion synthesis. Since the amount of adaptation data is small and the testing data is very different from the training data, a series of adaptation methods is necessary. Overview of the main articulatory speech synthesis system. Articulatory features for robust visual speech recognition. The following table explains how to get from a vocal tract to a synthetic sound. Articulatory features for expressive speech synthesis conference paper in acoustics, speech, and signal processing, 1988. Speech synthesis is artificial simulation of human speech with by a computer or other device. A study of acoustictoarticulatory inversion of speech by.
The classification of speech sounds in this way is called articulatory phonetics. Articulatory approaches to speech synthesis also derived their modern form of implementation from electrical engineering and computer science. Gesturebased articulatory text to speech synthesis vocaltractlab. Articulatory speech recognition, the recovery of speech from acoustic signals articulatory synthesis, computational techniques for synthesizing speech based on models of human articulation processes topicfocus articulation, a field of study concerned with marking old and new information in a clause. Given dynamic process of speech, the articulatory features may change during the pronunciation of a phoneme, the mapping chart provides two sets of articulatory features for the start and end portions respectively of such phonemes, as illustrated by the ay,b and t lines in table 2. Articulatory phonetic features for improved speech recognition. Modeling consonantvowel coarticulation for articulatory. After a short overview of human speech production mechanisms and wave propagation in the vocal tract, the acoustic tube model is derived. Articulatory synthesis vowels haskins laboratories. Studies have demonstrated that articulatory information can model speech variability effectively and can potentially help to improve speech recognition performance. Speech synthesis wikimili, the best wikipedia reader. Pdf an articulatory study of emotional speech production.
Index terms speech synthesis, articulatory features, emotional speech, metadata extraction, evaluation 1. The software has been released as two tarballs that are available in the project downloads. This vowel space shows some of the vowels that can be created using asy. Articulatory synthesis this is a description of the articulatory synthesis package in praat. Phonemelevel parametrization of speech using an articulatory model. In this approach, the ess is achieved by modifying the parameters of the neutral speech which is synthesized from the text. Whispery speech recognition using adapted articulatory. The counterpart of the voice recognition, speech synthesis is mostly used for translating text information into audio information and in applications such as voiceenabled services and mobile applications. To help in explicitly modeling these events, gestures. The main concept is that natural speech has three attributes in the human speech processing system, i. Index terms speech synthesis, articulatory features, emo tional speech.
We propose a novel application of the acoustic to articulatory inversion aai towards a quality assessment of the voice converted speech. Articulatory features for expressive speech synthesis by alan w. Articulatory features for large vocabulary speech recognition. Gnuspeech is an extensible, textto speech and language creation package, based on realtime, articulatory, speech synthesis byrules. I learned a great deal about good software engineering from reading the jrtk source code, thanks to all who put together this. We present work carried out to extend the text to speech tts platform marytts with a backend that serves as an interface to the articulatory synthesizer.
It consists of an introduction and comments on the six papers included in the thesis. It enables expressive speech synthesis, using both diphone and unitselection synthesis. In the subsections below we describe the synthesis technique employed and how it is used to derive articulatory features. Below, you can explore the steps in the synthesis process, or listen to these sounds. We also describe an evaluation of the resulting gesturebased articulatory tts, using artic. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda. Articulatory featurebased methods for acoustic and audio. Towards expressive speech synthesis in english on a. This web page provides a brief overview of the haskins laboratories articulatory synthesis program, asy, and related work.
For synthesis, a source sound is needed that supplies the driver of the vocal tract filter. Articulatory features prediction to predict the articulatory features from speech, we used hmmbased acousticto articulatory inverse mapping. In this paper, we perform a systematic study of acoustictoarticulatory inversion for nonnasalized vowel sounds by analysisbysynthesis using the maeda articulatory model and the xrmb database. Gestural model imitation of expressive microstructure sinewave synthesis expand. January 22nd 2019 this is a collection of examples of synthetic affective speech conveying an emotion or natural expression and maintained by felix burkhardt. Articulatory features for expressive speech synthesis. The haskins laboratories articulatory synthesis program, asy, can be used to synthesize static vowel sounds. Therefore, this kind of synthesis is generally considered as the best choice for research on paralinguistic effects like emotions schroder et al.
Note our articulatory features might sometimes be called by. To utilize the articulatory features in mdd, they must. Bidirectional lstm networks employing stacked bottleneck. Some of these samples are direct copies from natural data, others are generated by expertrules or derived from databases. Examples of manipulations using vocal tract area functions. Articulatory features prediction to predict the articulatory features from speech, we used hmmbased acoustictoarticulatory inverse mapping. The features were weighted based on their relevance for the production of each phone, using the ratio of the. In this paper, we perform a systematic study of acousticto articulatory inversion for nonnasalized vowel sounds by analysisby synthesis using the maeda articulatory model and the xrmb database. Gesturebased articulatory text to speech synthesis benjamin weitz1. Articulatory speech synthesis using a parametric model and a polynomial mapping technique.
According to schroder 2009, the expressive speech synthesis approaches can be broadly classified into the following three categories. Among various approaches for ess, the present paper focuses the development of ess systems by explicit control. Timothy bunnell 2, ying dou 3, prasanna kumar muthukumar 1, florian metze 1, daniel perry 4, tim polzehl 5, kishore prahallad 6, stefan steidl 7, and callie vaughn 8 1 language technologies institute, carnegie mellon university. Articulatory synthesis is a method of synthesizing speech by controlling the speech articulators e. Gnuspeech gnu project free software foundation fsf.
For a detailed description of the physics and mathematics behind the model, see boersma 1998, chapters 2 and 3. During the last few decades, advances in computer and speech technology increased the potential for speech synthesis of high quality. This paper describes our research on adaptation methods applied to articulatory feature detection on soft whispery speech recorded with a throat microphone. Pdf the use of articulatory movement data in speech synthesis. Inverted articulatory features have been found useful for speech recognition 911, but their effectiveness in speech modification is not well studied. What is gnuspeech gnuspeech makes it easy to produce high quality computer speech output, design new language databases, and create controlled speech stimuli for psychophysical experiments. A central challenge for articulatory speech synthesis is the simulation of realistic articulatory movements, which is critical for the generation of highly natural and intelligible speech. We use the first three formants as acoustic features and develop efficient algorithms for codebook search and subsequent convex optimization. Speech features discussed include pitch, duration, loudness, spectral structure. Integrating articulatory features into hmmbased parametric. The speech chain1963 speech synthesis educational film by bell telelphone laboratories challenges in speech synthesis vlog04. Integrating articulatory features into hmmbased parametric speech synthesis. Quality assessment of voice converted speech using.
Articulatory features for conversational speech recognition. Abstract this paper describes some of the results from the project entitled new parameterization for emotional speech synthesis held at the summer 2011 jhu clsp workshop. Sound propagation in an acoustic tube is modelled algorithmically as opposed to physically by the same techniques as used for modelling highspeed pulse transmissionlines 1. The resulting speech was evaluated both objectively, using techniques normally used for emotion identification, and subjectively, using crowdsourcing. This simplification of the vocal tract shape permits a rapid calculation of the vocal tract transfer function. Her system was based on dectalk, a commercially available texttospeech speech. A texttospeech tts system converts normal language text into speech. International symposium on speech, image processing and neural networks, pages 595 598, april 1994 s.
Top level programs include a feature extracter for speech recognition, and a vocoder for both coding and speech synthesis. The parameters of the vocal tract and vocal fold models are controlled by means of a gestural score similar to a musical score birkholz, 2007, which is a highlevel concept for speech movement control based on the ideas of articulatory phonology browman and goldstein, 1992. Background the first audiovisual speech recognizer was designed by. We also describe an evaluation of the resulting gesturebased articulatory tts, using articulatory and acoustic speech data. An articulatory study of emotional speech production.