• MALSORI
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• v.68
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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.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.4
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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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• v.31 no.4
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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.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.1
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• pp.82-90
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• 2010

This paper proposes an efficient method to enhance the quality of synthesized speech in HMM based speech synthesis system. The proposed method trains spectral parameters and excitation signals using Gaussian mixture model, and estimates appropriate excitation signals from spectral parameters during the synthesis stage. Both WB-PESQ and MUSHRA results show that the proposed method provides better speech quality than conventional HMM based speech synthesis system.

• MALSORI
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• v.68
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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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.3
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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.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
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• 2011.07a
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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.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.9 no.1
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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.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.38C no.2
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• pp.213-218
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• 2013

One of the most popular approaches to parameter adaptation in hidden Markov model (HMM) based systems is the maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) technique. In our previous study, we proposed factored MLLR (FMLLR) where each MLLR parameter is defined as a function of a control vector. We presented a method to train the FMLLR parameters based on a general framework of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Using the proposed algorithm, supplementary information which cannot be included in the models is effectively reflected in the adaptation process. In this paper, we apply the FMLLR algorithm to a pitch sequence as well as spectrum parameters. In a series of experiments on artificial generation of expressive speech, we evaluate the performance of the FMLLR technique and also compare with other approaches to parameter adaptation in HMM-based speech synthesis.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.53-63
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• 2015

Singing voice synthesis is the generation of a song using a computer given its lyrics and musical notes. Hidden Markov models (HMM) have been proved to be the models of choice for text to speech synthesis. HMMs have also been used for singing voice synthesis research, however, a huge database is needed for the training of HMMs for singing voice synthesis. And commercially available singing voice synthesis systems which use the piano roll music notation, needs to adopt the easy to read standard music notation which make it suitable for singing learning applications. To overcome this problem, we use a speech database for training context dependent HMMs, to be used for singing voice synthesis. Pitch and duration control methods have been devised to modify the parameters of the HMMs trained on speech, to be used as the synthesis units for the singing voice. This work describes a singing voice synthesis system which uses a MusicXML based music score editor as the front-end interface for entry of the notes and lyrics to be synthesized and a hidden Markov model based text to speech synthesis system as the back-end synthesizer. A perceptual test shows the feasibility of our proposed system.