Eric Keller

Improvements in Speech Synthesis

From the Publisher: Current work in speech synthesis is in an interesting double position. At the same time as increasingly natural-sounding speech synthesis, systems are being implemented for many of the worlds languages on the basis of existing, increasingly well understood concatentative technology. This technology entails some inherent limitations, and research on further improvements is still proceeding rapidly. This volume is an accumulation of studies emanating from COST 258, a European Action concerned with the issues in the improvement of speech synthesis.*Addresses the issues involved in improving the output quality when producing speech synthesis for world languages*Written by leading European researchers throughout academia and industry*Presents research results of COST 258*Areas covered include Improving Signal Generation, Improving Prosody and Tonal Quality and Improving and Supporting the Modelling ProcessResearchers and Engineers in speech synthesis, telecommunications and computer science will find the thorough coverage of this leading edge topic to be a valuable reference resource, and this text would also be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in the presentation of the most up-to-date research in this field.

Verbal and Nonverbal Communication Behaviours

COST 2102: Cross-Modal Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication (CAVeNC).- I - Verbal and Noverbal Coding Schema.- Annotation Schemes for Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication: Some General Issues.- Presenting in Style by Virtual Humans.- Analysis of Nonverbal Involvement in Dyadic Interactions.- II - Emotional Expressions.- Childrens Perception of Musical Emotional Expressions.- Emotional Style Conversion in the TTS System with Cepstral Description.- Meaningful Parameters in Emotion Characterisation.- III - Gestural Expressions.- Prosodic and Gestural Expression of Interactional Agreement.- Gesture, Prosody and Lexicon in Task-Oriented Dialogues: Multimedia Corpus Recording and Labelling.- Egyptian Grunts and Transportation Gestures.- IV - Analysis and Algorithms for Verbal and Nonverbal Speech.- On the Use of NonVerbal Speech Sounds in Human Communication.- Speech Spectrum Envelope Modeling.- Using Prosody in Fixed Stress Languages for Improvement of Speech Recognition.- Single-Channel Noise Suppression by Wavelets in Spectral Domain.- Voice Source Change During Fundamental Frequency Variation.- A Gesture-Based Concept for Speech Movement Control in Articulatory Speech Synthesis.- A Novel Psychoacoustically Motivated Multichannel Speech Enhancement System.- Analysis of Verbal and Nonverbal Acoustic Signals with the Dresden UASR System.- V - Machine Multimodal Interaction.- VideoTRAN: A Translation Framework for Audiovisual Face-to-Face Conversations.- Spoken and Multimodal Communication Systems in Mobile Settings.- Multilingual Augmentative Alternative Communication System.- Analysis and Synthesis of Multimodal Verbal and Non-verbal Interaction for Animated Interface Agents.- Generating Nonverbal Signals for a Sensitive Artificial Listener.- Low-Complexity Algorithms for Biometric Recognition.- Towards to Mobile Multimodal Telecommunications Systems and Services.- Embodied Conversational Agents in Wizard-of-Oz and Multimodal Interaction Applications.- Telling Stories with a Synthetic Character: Understanding Inter-modalities Relations.

The analysis of voice quality in speech processing

Voice quality has been defined as the characteristic auditory colouring of an individuals voice, derived from a variety of laryngeal and supralaryngeal features and running continuously through the individuals speech. The distinctive tone of speech sounds produced by a particular person yields a particular voice. Voice quality is at the centre of several speech processing issues. In speech recognition, voice differences, particularly extreme divergences from the norm, are responsible for known performance degradations. In speech synthesis on the other hand, voice quality is a desirable modelling parameter, with millions of voice types that can be distinguished theoretically. This article reviews the experimental derivation of voice quality markers. Specifically, the use of perceptual judgements, the long-term averaged spectrum (LTAS) and prosodic markers is examined, as well as inverse filtering for the extraction of the glottal source waveform. This review suggests that voice quality is best investigated as a multi-dimensional parameter space involving a combination of factors involving individual prosody, temporally structured speech characteristics, spectral divergence and voice source features, and that it could profitably complement simple linguistic prosodic model processing in speech synthesis.

Prosodic and gestural expression of interactional agreement

Conversational interactions are cooperatively constructed activities in which participants negotiate their entrances, turns and alignments with other speakers, oftentimes with an underlying long-term objective of obtaining some agreement. Obtaining a final and morally binding accord in a conversational interaction is of importance in a great variety of contexts, particularly in psychotherapeutic interactions, in contractual negotiations or in educational contexts. Various prosodic and gestural elements in a conversational interaction can be interpreted as signals of a speakers agreement and they are probably of importance in the emergence of an accord in a conversational exchange. In this paper, we survey the social and psychological context of agreement seeking, as well as the existing literature on the visual and prosodic measurement of agreement in conversational settings.

Microprosodic aspects of vowel dynamics—an acoustic study of French, English and Czech

Abstract The article gives an account of microdynamic behavior of vowels in three languages. The microdynamic profile, defined as a set of 10 normalized values measured at 10 equidistant points for each sound, shows systematic relations with the articulatory properties of the sound and its immediate context, but also with its duration and macrointensity. No systematic correlation with fundamental frequency was found. Apart from its theoretical value, research on microintensity can find a successful outlet in speech synthesis.