• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.30-39
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• 2003

Background and Objectives : Patients with pathologic voice often concern about recovery of voice after surgery. In our investigation, we give controlled values of three parameters of voice synthesis program of Dr. Speech Science. such as jitter, shimmer, and NNE(normalized noise energy) which characterize someone's voice from others and deviced a method to synthesize the predicted voice after performing operation. Subjects and Method : Values of vocal jitter, vocal shimmer, and glottal noise were measured with voices of 10 vocal cord Paralysis and 10 vocal Polyp Patients 1 week Prior to and 1 month after the surgery. With Dr. Speech science voice synthesis program we synthesized 'ae' vowel which is closely identical to preoperative and post-operative voice of the patients by controlling the values of jitter, shimmer, and glottal noise. then we analyzed the synthesized voices and compared with pre and post-operative voice. Results : 1) After inputting the preoperative and corrected values of jitter, shimmer, and glottal noise into the voice synthesis Program, voices identical to vocal Polyp Patients' Pre- and Postoperative voices withiin statistical significance were synthesized 2) After elimination of synergistic effects between three paramenter, we were able to synthesize voice identical to vocal paralysis patients' preoperative voices. 3) After inputting only slightly increased jitter, shimmer into the synthesis program, we were able to synthesize voice identical to vocal cord paralysis patients' postoperative voices. Conclusion : Voices synthesized with Dr. Speech science program were identical to patients' actual pre and postoperative voice, and clinicians will be able to give the patients more information and thus increased patients cooperability can be expected.

• 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.

• 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.115-120
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• 2001

In this paper, we synthesized vowel /ae/ with voice synthesis program of Dr. Speech Science, and we also synthesized pathologic vowel /ae/ by some parameters such as high frequency gain (HFG), low frequency gain(LFG), pitch flutter(PF) which represents jitter value and flutter of amplitude(FA) which represents shimmer value, and grade ranked as mild, moderate and severe respectively. And then we analysed all pathologic voice by analysis program of Dr. Speech Science. We expect that this synthesized pathologic voices are useful for understanding the parameter such as noise, jitter and shimmer and feedback effect to patient with voice disorder.

• 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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• 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.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.235-242
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• 2010

Differently from instruments which synthesized sounds and tones in the past, voice synthesis engine for music production has reached to the level of creating music as if actual artists were singing. It uses the samples of human voices naturally connected to the different levels of phoneme within the frequency range. Voice synthesis engine is not simply limited to the music production but it is changing cultural paradigm through the second creations of new music type including character music concerts, media productions, albums, and mobile services. Currently, voice synthesis engine technology makes it possible that users input pitch, lyrics, and musical expression parameters through the score editor and they mix and connect voice samples brought from the database to sing. New music types derived from such a development of computer music has sparked a big impact culturally. Accordingly, this paper attempts to examine the specific case studies and the synthesis technologies for users to understand the voice synthesis engine more easily, and it will contribute to their variety of music production.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.89-95
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• 2016

The purpose of this work is to analyze and synthesize the pseudo-periodicity of voice using a source model. A speech signal has periodic characteristics; however, it is not completely periodic. While periodicity contributes significantly to the production of prosody, emotional status, etc., pseudo-periodicity contributes to the distinctions between normal and abnormal status, the naturalness of normal speech, etc. Measurement of pseudo-periodicity is typically performed through parameters such as jitter and shimmer. For studying the pseudo-periodic nature of voice in a controlled environment, through collected natural voice, we can only observe the distributions of the parameters, which are limited by the size of collected data. If we can generate voice samples in a controlled manner, experiments that are more diverse can be conducted. In this study, the probability distributions of vowel pitch variation are obtained from the speech signal. Based on the probability distribution of vocal folds, pulses with a designated jitter value are synthesized. Then, the target and re-analyzed jitter values are compared to check the validity of the method. It was found that the jitter synthesis method is useful for normal voice synthesis.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2004.05a
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• pp.147-149
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• 2004

Although most of the people have studied English for a long time, their English conversation capability is low. When we provide them portable conversational-type English learners by the application of computer and information process technology, such portable learners can be used to enhance their English conversation capability by their conventional conversation exercises. The core technology to develop such learner is the development of a voice recognition and synthesis module under an embedded environment. This paper deals with voice recognition and synthesis, prototype of the learner module using a DSP(Digital Signal Processing) chip for voice processing, voice playback function, flash memory file system, PC download function using USB ports, English conversation text function by the use of SMC(Smart Media Card) flash memory, LCD display function, MP3 music listening function, etc. Application areas of the prototype equipped with such various functions are vast, i.e. portable language learners, amusement devices, kids toy, control by voice, security by the use of voice, etc.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.121-125
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• 2018

This paper describes procedures of changing and measuring voice quality in terms of jitter. Jitter synthesis method was applied to the TD-PSOLA analysis system of the Praat software. The jitter component is synthesized based on a Gaussian random noise model. The TD-PSOLA re-synthesize process is used to synthesize the modified voice with artificial jitter. Various vocal jitter parameters are used to measure the change in quality caused by artificial systematic jitter change. Synthetic vowels, natural vowels and short sentences are used to check the change in voice quality through the synthesizer model. The results shows that the suggested method is useful for voice quality control in a limited way and can be used to alter the jitter component of voice.