Synthesis of speech

• Main Author: Yeo, Poh Cheng
• Other Authors: Foo Say Wei
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/65296
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis should contribute to the pleasantness, intelligibility, and speed of speech-based human-machine interactions. The initial step is that articulatory speech synthesis attempts to mathematically model the human vocal system through area functions of its vocal organs. In this project, the author has used a male vocal system and designed a large unit inventory practical. Next, the design of the units is acoustically driven but limited by a complex pronunciation model. Finally, concatenative speech synthesis links different length of prerecorded speech samples together that were obtained from natural speech. Fortunately, concatenative synthesis requires less computational complexity at the expense of larger memory space. A set of vocabularies and a prerecorded speech corpus containing 40 phonemes serves as the basic acoustical units were created by the author before testing and carrying out the experiment for the TIS system. Further research was done on how other methods like Pitch-Synchronous Overlap Add (PSOLA) can better concatenate the chain of sound elements and eventually produce a continuous speech in English.