• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제68권
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• pp.65-74
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• 2008

A statistical parametric speech synthesis system based on the hidden Markov models (HMMs) has grown in popularity over the last few years, because it needs less memory and low computation complexity and is suitable for the embedded system in comparison with a corpus-based unit concatenation text-to-speech (TTS) system. It also has the advantage that voice characteristics of the synthetic speech can be modified easily by transforming HMM parameters appropriately. In this paper, we present experimental results of voice characteristics conversion using the HMM-based Korean speech synthesis system. The results have shown that conversion of voice characteristics could be achieved using a few sentences uttered by a target speaker. Synthetic speech generated from adapted models with only ten sentences was very close to that from the speaker dependent models trained using 646 sentences.

• 음성과학
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• 제15권4호
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• pp.97-105
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• 2008

Nowadays an HMM-based text-to-speech system (HTS) has been very widely studied because it needs less memory and low computation complexity and is suitable for embedded systems in comparison with a corpus-based unit concatenation text-to-speech one. It also has the advantage that voice characteristics and the speaking rate of the synthetic speech can be converted easily by modifying HMM parameters appropriately. We implemented an HMM-based Korean text-to-speech system using a small size Korean speech DB and proposes a method to increase the naturalness of the synthetic speech by controlling duration model parameters in the HMM-based Korean text-to speech system. We performed a paired comparison test to verify that theses techniques are effective. The test result with the preference scores of 73.8% has shown the improvement of the naturalness of the synthetic speech through controlling the duration model parameters.

• ETRI Journal
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• 제31권4호
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• pp.457-459
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• 2009

The optimum maximum voiced frequency (MVF) estimation-based two-band excitation for hidden Markov model-based speech synthesis is presented. An analysis-by-synthesis scheme is adopted for the MVF estimation which leads to the minimum spectral distortion of synthesized speech. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves synthetic speech quality.

• 한국음향학회지
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• 제29권1호
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• pp.82-90
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• 2010

본 논문에서는 HMM기반 음성합성시스템에서 합성음의 음질 개선을 위한 방법으로 스펙트럼 정보에 기반한 여기신호 추출방법을 제안한다. 제안된 방법은 스펙트럼 정보와 여기신호를 함께 통계적 모델로 만든 후에 합성 과정에서 스펙트럼 정보를 기반으로 여기신호를 추출해 냄으로써 스펙트럼 파라메터에 가장 적합한 여기신호를 사용할 수 있다. 제안된 방법으로 합성음의 음질을 MUSHRA 테스트 및 WB-FESQ점수를 통해 확인해 본 결과, 비슷한 조건에서 기존에 사용되는 STRAIGHT 방법을 이용한 합성음보다 좋은 음질을 얻을 수 있었다.

• 대한음성학회지:말소리
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• 제68권
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• pp.49-63
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• 2008

This paper describes the development and assessment of a hidden Markov model (HMM) based Tagalog speech synthesis system, where Tagalog is the most widely spoken indigenous language of the Philippines. Several aspects of the design process are discussed here. In order to build the synthesizer a speech database is recorded and phonetically segmented. The constructed speech corpus contains approximately 89 minutes of Tagalog speech organized in 596 spoken utterances. Furthermore, contextual information is determined. The quality of the synthesized speech is assessed by subjective tests employing 25 native Tagalog speakers as respondents. Experimental results show that the new system is able to obtain a 3.29 MOS which indicates that the developed system is able to produce highly intelligible neutral Tagalog speech with stable quality even when a small amount of speech data is used for HMM training.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제4권3호
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• pp.111-117
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• 2012

In this paper, we compare the performance of several speaker adaptation methods for a HMM-based Korean speech synthesis system with small amounts of adaptation data. According to objective and subjective evaluations, a hybrid method of constrained structural maximum a posteriori linear regression (CSMAPLR) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) adaptation shows better performance than other methods, when only five minutes of adaptation data are available for the target speaker. During the objective evaluation, we find that the duration models are insufficiently adapted to the target speaker as the spectral envelope and pitch models. To alleviate the problem, we propose the duration rectification method and the duration interpolation method. Both the objective and subjective evaluations reveal that the incorporation of the proposed two methods into the conventional speaker adaptation method is effective in improving the performance of the duration model adaptation.

• 한국방송∙미디어공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국방송공학회 2011년도 하계학술대회
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• pp.89-91
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• 2011

In this paper, phrase boundaries in sentence are predicted and a phrase break information is applied to an HMM-based Korean Text-to-Speech synthesis system. Synthesis with phrase break information increases a naturalness of the synthetic speech and an understanding of sentences. To predict these phrase boundaries, context-dependent information like forward/backward POS(Part-of-Speech) of eojeol, a position of eojeol in a sentence, length of eojeol, and presence or absence of punctuation marks are used. The experimental results show that the naturalness of synthetic speech with phrase break information increases.

• 말소리와 음성과학
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• 제9권1호
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• pp.41-47
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• 2017

The main advantage of the statistical parametric speech synthesis is its flexibility in changing voice characteristics. A personalized text-to-speech(TTS) system can be implemented by combining a speech synthesis system and a voice transformation system, and it is widely used in many application areas. It is known that the fundamental frequency and the spectral envelope of speech signal can be independently modified to convert the voice characteristics. Also it is important to maintain naturalness of the transformed speech. In this paper, a speech synthesis system based on Hidden Markov Model(HMM-based speech synthesis, HTS) using the STRAIGHT vocoder is constructed and voice transformation is conducted by modifying the fundamental frequency and spectral envelope. The fundamental frequency is transformed in a scaling method, and the spectral envelope is transformed through frequency warping method to control the speaker's vocal tract length. In particular, this study proposes a voice transformation method using the correlation between fundamental frequency and vocal tract length. Subjective evaluations were conducted to assess preference and mean opinion scores(MOS) for naturalness of synthetic speech. Experimental results showed that the proposed voice transformation method achieved higher preference than baseline systems while maintaining the naturalness of the speech quality.

• 한국통신학회논문지
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• 제38C권2호
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• pp.213-218
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• 2013

은닉 마코프 모델 (hidden Markov Model, HMM) 기반 음성 합성 시스템에서 파라미터 적응을 위해 널리 쓰이는 기법으로 최대 공산 선형 회귀 (maximum likelihood linear regression, MLLR)이 있다. 이전 연구에서 우리는 각 MLLR 파라미터를 인자화된 MLLR (Factored MLLR, FMLLR) 형태로 확장하는 형태를 제안하였다. FMLLR 파라미터를 기존의 EM 알고리즘 형태로 구하는 기법 역시 제안하였고, 이를 통해 보완 정보를 활용하여 적응 학습을 수행할 수 있게 하였다. 본 논문에서는, FMLLR 기법을 스펙트럼 파라미터에 사용하는 것뿐 아니라 피치에도 적용하여 그 성능을 향상시키는 것에 대한 탐구를 수행하였다. 감정 음성을 생성하는 여러 실험을 통해, 우리는 제안하는 기법이 피치 및 스펙트럼에 대해 효과적으로 작용하는 것을 확인하였다.

• 한국컴퓨터정보학회논문지
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• 제20권5호
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• pp.53-63
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• 2015

노래음 합성이란 주어진 가사와 악보를 이용하여 컴퓨터에서 노래음을 생성하는 것이다. 텍스트/음성 변환기에 널리 사용된 HMM 기반 음성합성기는 최근 노래음 합성에도 적용되고 있다. 그러나 기존의 구현방법에는 대용량의 노래음 데이터베이스 수집과 학습이 필요하여 구현에 어려움이 있다. 또한 기존의 상용 노래음 합성시스템은 피아노 롤 방식의 악보 표현방식을 사용하고 있어 일반인에게는 익숙하지 않으므로 읽기 쉬운 표준 악보형식의 사용자 인터페이스를 지원하여 노래 학습의 편의성을 향상시킬 필요가 있다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위하여 본 논문에서는 기존 낭독형 음성합성기의 HMM 모델을 이용하고 노래음에 적합한 피치값과 지속시간 제어방법을 적용하여 HMM 모델 파라미터 값을 변화시킴으로서 노래음을 생성하는 방법을 제안한다. 그리고 음표와 가사를 입력하기 위한 MusicXML 기반의 악보편집기를 전단으로, HMM 기반의 텍스트/음성 변환 합성기를 합성기 후단으로서 사용하여 노래음 합성시스템을 구현하는 방법을 제안한다. 본 논문에서 제안하는 방법을 이용하여 합성된 노래음을 평가하였으며 평가결과 활용 가능성을 확인하였다.