15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Expressing Vocal Effort in Concatenative Synthesis

Marc Schröder (1), Martine Grice (2)

(1) DFKI GmbH, Germany
(2) Saarland University, Germany

A new diphone database with a full diphone set for each of three levels of vocal effort is presented. A theoretical motivation is given why this kind of database will be useful for emotional speech synthesis. Two hypotheses are verified in perception experiments: (I) The three diphone sets are perceived as belonging to the same speaker; (II) The vocal effort intended during database recordings is perceived in the synthetic voice. The results clearly confirm both hypotheses.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Schröder, Marc / Grice, Martine (2003): "Expressing vocal effort in concatenative synthesis", In ICPhS-15, 2589-2592.