Speech Prosody in Speech Synthesis: Modeling and generation of prosody for high quality and flexible speech synthesis

The volume addresses issues concerning prosody generation in speech synthesis, including prosody modeling, how we can convey para- and non-linguistic information in speech synthesis, and prosody control in speech synthesis (including prosody conversions). A high level of quality has already been achieved in speech synthesis by using selection-based methods with segments of human speech. Although the method enables synthetic speech with various voice qualities and speaking styles, it requires large speech corpora with targeted quality and style.

Accordingly, speech conversion techniques are now of growing interest among researchers. HMM/GMM-based methods are widely used, but entail several major problems when viewed from the prosody perspective; prosodic features cover a wider time span than segmental features and their frame-by-frame processing is not always appropriate. The book offers a good overview of state-of-the-art studies on prosody in speech synthesis.

Modeling of Prosody.- ProZed: A speech prosody editor for linguists, using analysis-by-synthesis.- On degree of freedom in prosody modeling.- Extraction, analysis and synthesis of Fujisaki model parameters.- Probabilistic modeling of pitch contours towards prosody synthesis and conversion.- Para- and non-linguistic issues of prosody.- Communicative speech synthesis as pan-linguistic prosody control.- Mandarin stress analysis and prediction for speech synthesis.- Expressivity in interactive speech synthesis; some para-linguistic and non-linguistic issues of speech prosody for conversational dialogue systems.- Temporally variable multi-attribute morphing of arbitrarily many voices for exploratory research of speech prosody.- Control of prosody in speech synthesis.- Statistical models for dealing with discontinuity of fundamental frequency.- Use of generation process model for improved control of fundamental frequency contours in HMM-based speech synthesis.- Tone Nucleus Model for Emotional Mandarin Speech Synthesis.- Emphasis, word prominence, and continuous wavelet transform in the control of HMM based synthesis.- Exploiting alternatives for text-to-speech synthesis: from machine to human.- Prosody control and variation enhancement techniques for HMM-based expressive speech synthesis.