• ETRI Journal
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.168-176
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• 2001

This paper discusses two important issues of corpus-based synthesis: synthesis unit generation based on phrase break strength information and pruning redundant synthesis unit instances. First, the new sentence set for recording was designed to make an efficient synthesis database, reflecting the characteristics of the Korean language. To obtain prosodic context sensitive units, we graded major prosodic phrases into 5 distinctive levels according to pause length and then discriminated intra-word triphones using the levels. Using the synthesis unit with phrase break strength information, synthetic speech was generated and evaluated subjectively. Second, a new pruning method based on weighted vector quantization (WVQ) was proposed to eliminate redundant synthesis unit instances from the synthesis database. WVQ takes the relative importance of each instance into account when clustering similar instances using vector quantization (VQ) technique. The proposed method was compared with two conventional pruning methods through objective and subjective evaluations of synthetic speech quality: one to simply limit the maximum number of instances, and the other based on normal VQ-based clustering. For the same reduction rate of instance number, the proposed method showed the best performance. The synthetic speech with reduction rate 45% had almost no perceptible degradation as compared to the synthetic speech without instance reduction.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.461-469
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• 2000

In the paper, the design and the implementation of the netscape plug-in and the speech synthesis enginegenerating the speech sounds from the text information of the web pages are described. The steps of the generating speech sound from an web pages are the speech synthesis plug-in is activated when the netscape finds the audio/xesp MIME data type embedded in the browsed web page; the HTML file referenced in the EMBED MTML tag is down loaded from the referenced URL to send to the commander object located in the said plug-in; The speech synthesis engine control tags and the text characters are extracted from the down loaded HTML document by the commander object the synthesized speech sounds are generated by the speech synthesis engine. The speech synthesis engine interprets the command streams from the commander objects to call the member functions for the processing of the speech segment data in the data banks. The commander object and the speech synthesis engine are designed as an independent object to enhancethe flexitility and the portability.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.91-94
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• 1994

This paper is a study on the design and implementation of the Korean Tet-to-Speech system. In this paper, parameter symthesis method is chosen for speech symthesis method and PARCOR coeffient, one of the LPC analysis, is used as acoustic parameter, We use a diphone as synthesis unit, it include a basic naturalness of human speech. Diphone DB is consisted of 1228 PCM files. LPC synthesis method has defect that decline clearness of synthesis speech, during synthesizing unvoiced sound In this paper, we improve clearness of synthesized speech, using residual signal as ecitation signal of unvoiced sound. Besides, to improve a naturalness, we control the prosody of synthesized speech through controlling the energy and pitch pattern. Synthesis system is implemented at PC/486 and use a 70Hz-4.5KHz band pass filter for speech imput/output, amplifier and TMS320c30 DSP board.

• 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.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.06d
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• pp.369-372
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• 2002

In this paper, we present an improved TTS synthesis system using articulatory synthesis and concatenative synthesis. In concatenative synthesis, segments of speech are excised from spoken utterances and connected to form the desired speech signal. We adopt LPC as a parameter, VQ to reduce the memory capacity, and TD-PSOLA to solve the naturalness problem.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.55-63
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• 2005

This paper introduces a 'Hanmal' Korean language diphone database for speech synthesis, which has been publicly available since 1999 in the MBROLA web site and never been properly published in a journal. The diphone database is compatible with the MBROLA programme of high-quality multilingual speech synthesis systems. The usefulness of the diphone database is introduced in the paper. The paper also describes the phonetic and phonological structure of the database, showing the process of creating a text corpus. A machine-readable Korean SAMPA convention for the control data input to the MBROLA application is also suggested. Diphone concatenation and prosody manipulation are performed using the MBR-PSOLA algorithm. A set of segment duration models can be applied to the diphone synthesis of Korean.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1998.08a
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• pp.87-92
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• 1998

In general, the synthesis unit database was constructed by recording isolated word. In that case, each boundary of word has typical prosodic pattern like a falling intonation or preboundary lengthening. To get natural synthetic speech using these kinds of database, we must artificially distort original speech. However, that artificial process rather resulted in unnatural, unintelligible synthetic speech due to the excessive prosodic modification on speech signal. To overcome these problems, we gathered thousands of sentences for synthesis database. To make a phone level synthesis unit, we trained speech recognizer with the recorded speech, and then segmented phone boundaries automatically. In addition, we used laryngo graph for the epoch detection. From the automatically generated synthesis database, we chose the best phone and directly concatenated it without any prosody processing. To select the best phone among multiple phone candidates, we used prosodic information such as break strength of word boundaries, phonetic contexts, cepstrum, pitch, energy, and phone duration. From the pilot test, we obtained some positive results.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.9-23
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• 1997

Through iterative analysis and synthesis experiments on Korean monosyllables, the Korean text-to-speech system was implemented using the phoneme-based formant synthesis method. Since the formants of initial and final consonants in this system showed many variations depending on the medial vowels, the database for each phoneme was made up of formants depending on the medial vowels as well as duration information of transition region. These techniques were needed to improve the intelligibility of synthetic speech. This paper investigates also methods of concatenating the synthesis units to improve the quality of synthetic speech.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.137-147
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• 2003

Speech synthesis can classify by synthesis way, that is waveform coding, source coding and mixture coding. Specially, waveform coding is suitable for high quality synthesis. However, it is not desirable by synthesis techniques of syllable or phoneme unit because it do not separate and handles excitation and formant part. Therefore, there is a need for pitch alteration method applied in synthesis by the rule in waveform coding. This study propose about pitch alteration method that use spectrum scaling after do to flatten spectra by subband linear approximation to minimize spectrum distortion. This paper show evaluation whether show excellency of some measure compared with LPC, Cepstrum, lifter function and method that propose. estimation method seeks distribution of each flattened signal and measured degree of flattened spectra Signal flattened is normalized, So that highest point amounts to zero, and distribution of signal ,whose average is zero, is calculated. this show result that measure the spectrum distortion rate to estimate performance of method that propose. The average spectrum distortion rate was kept below the average 2.12%, so the method that propose is superiors than existent method.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.2
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• pp.25-44
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• 1997

When listening the various speech synthesis systems developed and being used in our country, we find that though the quality of these systems has improved, they lack naturalness. Moreover, since the voice color of these systems are limited to only one recorded speech DB, it is necessary to record another speech DB to create different voice colors. 'Voice Color' is an abstract concept that characterizes voice personality. So speech synthesis systems need a voice color control function to create various voices. The aim of this study is to examine several factors of voice color control rules for the text-to-speech system which makes natural and various voice types for the sounding of synthetic speech. In order to find such rules from natural speech, glottal source parameters and frequency characteristics of the vocal tract for several voice colors have been studied. In this paper voice colors were catalogued as: deep, sonorous, thick, soft, harsh, high tone, shrill, and weak. For the voice source model, the LF-model was used and for the frequency characteristics of vocal tract, the formant frequencies, bandwidths, and amplitudes were used. These acoustic parameters were tested through multiple regression analysis to achieve the general relation between these parameters and voice colors.