7 accepted papers
Most state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech systems use the mel-spectrogram as an intermediate representation, to decompose the task into acoustic modelling and waveform generation.A mel-spectrogram is extracted from the waveform by a simple, fast DSP operation, but generating a high-quality waveform from…
We propose a new method for human speech intelligibility evaluation based on keyword spotting. In this method, participants play a stimulus and select the word they hear from a close set of alternatives. To find which sentence to use, the target word, and alternatives we mine a large set of stimuli…
We present a neural vocoder designed with low-powered Alternative and Augmentative Communication devices in mind. By combining elements of successful modern vocoders with established ideas from an older generation of technology, our system is able to produce high quality synthetic speech at 48kHz on…
This paper presents a method for upsampling and transforming a compact representation of acoustics into a corresponding speech waveform. Similar to a conventional vocoder, the proposed system takes a pulse train derived from fundamental frequency and a noise sequence as inputs and shapes them to be…
Forced alignment for speech synthesis traditionally aligns a phoneme sequence predetermined by the front-end text processing system. This sequence is not altered during alignment, i.e., it is forced, despite possibly being faulty. The consistency assumption is the assumption that these mistakes do n…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) use a cascade of hidden representations to enable the learning of complex mappings from input to output features. They are able to learn the complex mapping from text-based linguistic features to speech acoustic features, and so perform text-to-speech synthesis. Recent re…
Given a transcription, sampling from a good model of acoustic feature trajectories should result in plausible realizations of an utterance. However, samples from current probabilistic speech synthesis systems result in low quality synthetic speech. Henter et al. have demonstrated the need to capture…