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Improvement of Synthetic Speech Quality using a New Spectral Smoothing Technique  

장효종 (숭실대학교 컴퓨터학과)
최형일 (숭실대학교 미디어학부)
Publication Information
Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications / v.30, no.11, 2003 , pp. 1037-1043 More about this Journal
Abstract
This paper describes a speech synthesis technique using a diphone as an unit phoneme. Speech synthesis is basically accomplished by concatenating unit phonemes, and it's major problem is discontinuity at the connection part between unit phonemes. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a new spectral smoothing technique which reflects not only formant trajectories but also distribution characteristics of spectrum and human's acoustic characteristics. That is, the proposed technique decides the quantity and extent of smoothing by considering human's acoustic characteristics at the connection part of unit phonemes, and then performs spectral smoothing using weights calculated along a time axis at the border of two diphones. The proposed technique reduces the discontinuity and minimizes the distortion which is caused by spectral smoothing. For the purpose of performance evaluation, we tested on five hundred diphones which are extracted from twenty sentences using ETRI Voice DB samples and individually self-recorded samples.
Keywords
formant trajectory; spectral smoothing; acoustic characteristic; speech synthesis;
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