Prosodic and spectral iVectors for expressive speech synthesis

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Document typeConference lecture
Defense date2016
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Rights accessOpen Access
Abstract
This work presents a study on the suitability of prosodic andacoustic features, with a special focus on i-vectors, in expressivespeech analysis and synthesis. For each utterance of two dif-ferent databases, a laboratory recorded emotional acted speech,and an audiobook, several prosodic and acoustic features are ex-tracted. Among them, i-vectors are built not only on the MFCCbase, but also on F0, power and syllable durations. Then, un-supervised clustering is performed using different feature com-binations. The resulting clusters are evaluated calculating clus-ter entropy for labeled portions of the databases. Additionally,synthetic voices are trained, applying speaker adaptive training,from the clusters built from the audiobook. The voices are eval-uated in a perceptual test where the participants have to edit anaudiobook paragraph using the synthetic voices.The objective results suggest that i-vectors are very use-ful for the audiobook, where different speakers (book charac-ters) are imitated. On the other hand, for the laboratory record-ings, traditional prosodic features outperform i-vectors. Also,a closer analysis of the created clusters suggest that differentspeakers use different prosodic and acoustic means to conveyemotions. The perceptual results suggest that the proposed i-vector based feature combinations can be used for audiobookclustering and voice training.
CitationJauk, I., Bonafonte, A. Prosodic and spectral iVectors for expressive speech synthesis. A: ISCA Speech Synthesis Workshop. "SSW9: 9th ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis: proceedings: Sunnyvale (CA, USA): September 13-15, 2016". Sunnyvale, CA: International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), 2016, p. 59-63.
ISBN978-0-9928-6266-4
Publisher versionhttp://dx.doi.org/10.21437/SSW.2016-10
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