• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2008.05a
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• pp.784-788
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• 2008

In this research, we propose a remote speech input unit, a new method of user-friendly speech input in speech recognition system. We focused the user friendliness on hands-free and microphone independence in speech recognition applications. Our module adopts two algorithms, the automatic speech detection and speech enhancement based on the microphone array-based beamforming method. In the performance evaluation of speech detection, within-200msec accuracy with respect to the manually detected positions is about 97percent under the noise environments of 25dB of the SNR. The microphone array-based speech enhancement using the delay-and-sum beamforming algorithm shows about 6dB of maximum SNR gain over a single microphone and more than 12% of error reduction rate in speech recognition.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1999.06a
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• pp.699-707
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• 1999

It cannot be argued that speech is the most natural interfacing tool between men and machines. In order to realize acceptable speech interfaces, highly advanced speech recognizers and synthesizers are inevitable. Text-to-Speech(TTS) technology has been attracting a lot of interest among speech engineers because of its own benefits. Namely, the possible application areas of talking computers, emergency alarming systems in speech, speech output devices fur speech-impaired, and so on. Hence, many researchers have made significant progresses in the speech synthesis techniques in the sense of their own languages and as a result, the quality of currently available speech synthesizers are believed to be acceptable to normal users. These are partly why the MPEG group had decided to include the TTS technology as one of its MPEG-4 functionalities. ETRI has made major contributions to the current MPEG-4 TTS among various MPEG-4 functionalities. They are; 1) use of original prosody for synthesized speech output, 2) trick mode functions fer general users without breaking synthesized speech prosody, 3) interoperability with Facial Animation(FA) tools, and 4) dubbing a moving/animated picture with lib-shape pattern information.

• 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.

• MALSORI
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• no.46
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• pp.145-157
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• 2003

In this paper, we'd like to briefly introduce Korean common speech database, which project has been started to construct a large scaled speech database since 2002. The project aims at supporting the R&D environment of the speech technology for industries. It encourages domestic speech industries and activates speech technology domestic market. In the first year, the resulting common speech database consists of 25 kinds of databases considering various recording conditions such as telephone, PC, VoIP etc. The speech database will be widely used for speech recognition, speech synthesis, and speaker identification. On the other hand, although the database was originally corrected by manual, still it retains unknown errors and human errors. So, in order to minimize the errors in the database, we tried to find the errors based on the recognition errors and classify several kinds of errors. To be more effective than typical recognition technique, we will develop the automatic error detection method. In the future, we will try to construct new databases reflecting the needs of companies and universities.

• MALSORI
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• no.49
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• pp.63-75
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• 2004

Most existing telephone speech transmitted in current public networks is band-limited to 0.3-3.4 kHz. Compared with wideband speech(0-8 kHz), the narrowband speech lacks low-band (0-0.3 kHz) and high-band(3.4-8 kHz) components of sound. As a result, the speech is characterized by the reduced intelligibility and a muffled quality, and degraded speaker identification. Bandwidth extension is a technique to provide wideband speech quality, which means reconstruction of low-band and high-band components without any additional transmitted information. Our new approach considers to exploit harmonic synthesis method for reconstruction of low-band speech over the CELP coded speech. A spectral distortion measurement and listening test are introduced to assess the proposed method, and the improvement of synthesized speech quality was verified.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.45-58
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• 2001

Modulated components of a speech signal are frequently used for speech coding, speech recognition, and speech synthesis. Time-frequency representation (TFR) reveals some information about instantaneous frequency, instantaneous bandwidth and boundary of each component of the considering speech signal. In many cases, the extraction of AM-FM components corresponding to instantaneous frequencies is difficult since the Fourier spectra of the components with time-varying instantaneous frequency are overlapped each other in Fourier frequency domain. In this paper, an efficient method decomposing speech signal into AM-FM components is proposed. A variable bandwidth filter is developed for the decomposition of speech signals with time-varying instantaneous frequencies. The variable bandwidth filter can extract AM-FM components of a speech signal whose TFRs are not overlapped in timefrequency domain. Also, amplitude and instantaneous frequency of the decomposed components are estimated by using Hilbert transform.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06a
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• pp.984-990
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• 1994

In this paper a new speech synthesis method in the time domain using mono-syllables is proposed. It is to overcome the degradation of the synthetic speech quality by the synthesis method in the frequency domain and to develop an algorithm in the time domain for the prosodic control. In particular when we use a method in a time domain with mono-syllable as a synthesis unit it will be the main issues which are to control th pitch period and to smooth the energy pattern. As a solution to the pitch control, a method using Lagrange interpolation is suggested. As a solution to the other problem, an algorithm which can control the amplitude envelop shape of mono-syllable is proposed. As the results of experiments it was possible to synthesize unlimited Korean speeches including the prosody control. Accoding to the MOS evaluation the quality and the naturality in them was improved to be a good level.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.35-47
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• 1999

This paper describes procedures to model and synthesize emotional speech in a multimedia environment. At first, procedures to model the visual representation of emotional speech are proposed. To display the sequences of the images in synchronized form with speech, MSF(Multimedia Speech File) format is proposed and the display software is implemented. Then the emotional speech sinal is collected and analysed to obtain the prosodic characteristics of the emotional speech in limited domain. Multi-emotional sentences are spoken by actors. From the emotional speech signals, prosodic structures are compared in terms of the pseudo-syntactic structure. Based on the analyzed result, neutral speech is transformed into a specific emotinal state by modifying the prosodic structures.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.98-104
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• 1996

This paper propose the alteraton rule to compensate a formant trasition of several connected vowels for improving an unnatural synthesized continuous speech which is concatenated by each demisyllable without coarticulated formant transition for use in dmisyllable based synthesis by rule. To fullfill each formant transition part, the database of 42 stationary vowels which are segmented from the stable part of each vowels is appended to the one of Korean demisyllables, and the resonance circuit used in formant synthesis is employed to change the formant frequency of speech signals. To evaluate the synthesied speech by this rule, we carried out the alteration rule for connected vowels of the synthesized speech based on demisyllable, and compare spectrogram and MOS tested scores with the original and the demisyllable based synthesized speech without this rule. The result shows that this proposed rule can synthesize the more natural speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.85-94
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• 2003

In this paper an algorithm to reduce the size of Text-to-Speech database is proposed. The algorithm is based on the characteristics of Korean phonemic units. From the initial database, a reduced phoneme unit set is induced by articulatory similarity of concatenating phonemes. Speech data is read by one female announcer for 1000 phonetically balanced sentences. All the recorded speech is then segmented by phoneticians. Total size of the original speech data is about 640 MB including laryngograph signal. To synthesize wave, RE-PSOLA (Residual-Excited Pitch Synchronous Overlap and Add Method) was used. The voice quality of synthesized speech was compared with original speech in terms of spectrographic informations and objective tests. The quality of the synthesized speech is not much degraded when the size of synthesis DB was reduced from 320 MB to 82 MB.