- 著者
- Kiyoshi KURIHARA Nobumasa SEIYAMA Tadashi KUMANO
- 出版者
- The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
- 雑誌
- IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems (ISSN:09168532)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.E104.D, no.2, pp.302-311, 2021-02-01 (Released:2021-02-01)
- 参考文献数
- 35
- 被引用文献数
- 11
This paper describes a method to control prosodic features using phonetic and prosodic symbols as input of attention-based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) acoustic modeling (AM) for neural text-to-speech (TTS). The method involves inserting a sequence of prosodic symbols between phonetic symbols that are then used to reproduce prosodic acoustic features, i.e. accents, pauses, accent breaks, and sentence endings, in several seq2seq AM methods. The proposed phonetic and prosodic labels have simple descriptions and a low production cost. By contrast, the labels of conventional statistical parametric speech synthesis methods are complicated, and the cost of time alignments such as aligning the boundaries of phonemes is high. The proposed method does not need the boundary positions of phonemes. We propose an automatic conversion method for conventional labels and show how to automatically reproduce pitch accents and phonemes. The results of objective and subjective evaluations show the effectiveness of our method.
- 著者
- Reiko TAKOU Hiroyuki SEGI Tohru TAKAGI Nobumasa SEIYAMA
- 出版者
- The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
- 雑誌
- IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences (ISSN:09168508)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.E95-A, no.4, pp.751-759, 2012-04-01
The frequency regions and spectral features that can be used to measure the perceived similarity and continuity of voice quality are reported here. A perceptual evaluation test was conducted to assess the naturalness of spoken sentences in which either a vowel or a long vowel of the original speaker was replaced by that of another. Correlation analysis between the evaluation score and the spectral feature distance was conducted to select the spectral features that were expected to be effective in measuring the voice quality and to identify the appropriate speech segment of another speaker. The mel-frequency cepstrum coefficient (MFCC) and the spectral center of gravity (COG) in the low-, middle-, and high-frequency regions were selected. A perceptual paired comparison test was carried out to confirm the effectiveness of the spectral features. The results showed that the MFCC was effective for spectra across a wide range of frequency regions, the COG was effective in the low- and high-frequency regions, and the effective spectral features differed among the original speakers.