Talk/meeting: Donata Moers / synthesis of fast speech

[Antonio Bonafonte]

Benvolguts,

Donata Moers is visiting us, as a part of the Erasmus lecturer-exchange program.
Donata is a lecturer at the former "IKP" (Wolfgang Hess) of the University of Bonn. At the same time, she is doing her PhD at the Bielefeld University with Petra Wagner being her supervisor.
You can meet Donata during this and next week at room D4-100.

Next Wednesday, she will give a talk about her PhD research topic. Following the good traditions of our group, I will bring **the cake**.

• Topic: Fast Speech in Unit Selection Synthesis
• Who: Donata Moers, University of Bonn/University of Bielefeld
• When: March 23rd, (Wednesday); 11.30A.M
• Where: Seminars room (D5-007)

In this presentation of my current work, I present a new approach to synthesizing fast speech in unit selection synthesis.
After recording two inventories - one at normal and one at fast speech rate articulated as accurately as possible - the natural speech first was perceptually evaluated and then automatically preprocessed. Afterwards, utterances were synthesized from both corpora independently. Since fast rate speech differs from normal rate speech in terms of acoustic characteristics, the concept of multi-phone (phoxsy) units (Breuer and Abresch, 2004) was implemented and used to synthesize speech at both speaking rates again. A perceptual evaluation showed that phoxsy units enhanced the intelligibility especially for fast synthetic speech significantly. To conclude with,the ongoing perception experiments investigating fast speech synthesized from the two different inventories and accelerated to varying speech rates with regard to intelligibility and overall speech quality are presented.

Saludos,
Toni

[Sisco]

Perfecte Toni, recuperem La Veu dels dimecres, ara que entrem a la primavera.

Proposo dues coses:

1. Fer una sessiￜ cada 15 dies.
1. Call for proposals. Send a mail to francesc....@upc.edu
2. Obrir la convocatï¿œria a la resta de GPS. (Els becaris de imatge estan fent presentacions i cake des de fa un temps)

Algun suggeriment?

Sisco
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