Articulatory speech synthesis of Portuguese

Teixeira, Martinez, Silva, Jesus and Vaz (2004)

In Proceedings of the International Workshop in Phonetics Dedicated to the Memory of Farkas Kempelen, Budapest, Hungary.

Recent speech technology developments are characterized by increasing physical and psychological similarity to humans. Articulatory synthesis has a natural appeal to those considering machine synthesis of speech, and has been an important approach since the pioneering work of Farkas Kempelen. SAPWindows (Teixeira et al. 2002, IEEE SP Workshop on Speech Synthesis) is an European Portuguese articulatory speech synthesis system we have been developing, since 1995, at the University of Aveiro. It was created using an object-oriented design and written in Microsoft Visual C++. It offers a framework for development and implementation of new articulatory, acoustic and source models, and it is a tool for speech synthesis research. Our objective is a simultaneous improvement of our synthesis quality and of our knowledge about European Portuguese production and perception. We also aim to provide a tool usable by researchers from less technical areas such as Phonetics (used as a teaching aid and in stimuli production for perceptual studies), and Speech Therapy, for visual feedback and modeling of pathological voices. We have presented in the past some studies focused on the production of Portuguese vowels and nasals (Teixeira, et al. 1999, ICPhS), and are currently working on incorporating models of frication into the articulatory synthesizer (Teixeira, et al. 2003). Recent improvements of the SAPWindows editor interface allow a more flexible and comprehensible selection of parameters for the articulatory and source models. Parameters can be changed manually or loaded from a previously saved configuration. Static and dynamic views of parameters are supported. The vocal tract geometry and the area function changing during speech synthesis can be recorded in an AVI file. An acoustic-to-articulatory mapping module for fricatives is planned as future work.

TeixeiraMartinezSilvaJesusVaz2004ppt.pdf - Oral presentation (Acrobat 6.0 file)

TeixeiraMartinezSilvaJesusVaz2004video.zip - Synthesis videos (AVI files, compressed with PowerArchiver 2001 Version 6.11)

TeixeiraMartinezSilvaJesusVaz2004audio.zip - Synthesis output (WAV files, compressed with PowerArchiver 2001 Version 6.11)


Last updated 25/6/2007
lmtj@ua.pt
Luís Miguel Teixeira de Jesus

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