Prosody modification in Filipino speech synthesis using dynamic time warping

• Published in: IEEE TENCON 2003 : Conference on Convergent Technologies for the Asia-Pacific Region : October 15-17, 2003, Bangalore, India Vol. 1; pp. 397 - 401 Vol.1
• Main Authors: Co, M.O., Guevara, R.C.L.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2003
• Subjects: Acoustic testing; Acoustical engineering; Cities and towns; Concatenated codes; Fatigue; Loudspeakers; Natural languages; Speech synthesis; Stress; Synthesizers
• ISBN: 0780381629; 9780780381629
• DOI: 10.1109/TENCON.2003.1273353

Prosody is composed of two components: microprosody and macroprosody. Microprosody is solely influenced by individual speech sounds while macroprosody is subject to the speaker's choice of intonation. The paper deals with the latter and describes the result of using dynamic time warping (DTW) for changing the macroprosody of speech segments in a concatenative synthesizer. Prerecorded Filipino words uttered in isolation are stored in a corpus. When a text is typed, the utterances of the words are searched in the corpus. The acoustical features of macroprosody are extracted from prerecorded utterances of selected Filipino sentences and modified through DTW. The acoustic features are embedded in the speech segments by using the TD-PSOLA. This synthesis process achieves an average MOS of 2.64 in the acceptability test. In a separate test procedure, results showed 98% of the synthesized Filipino sentences were accurately distinguished as either declarative or interrogative sentences.