Sixth ISCA Workshop on Speech Synthesis Bonn, Germany August 22-24, 2007

Development of a BOSS Unit Selection Module for Tone Languages

Arne Bachmann, Stefan Breuer

Institute of Communication Sciences (IfK), University of Bonn, Germany

The Bonn Open Synthesis System (BOSS) is a toolkit for the efficient development of speech synthesis applications. To facilitate adaptation to tone languages, we added support for tone contour quantization and prediction. Now it is possible to integrate syllable and word tone templates into the system and predict as well as select them efficiently. The simple model presented here is trained automatically and works independently of the morphophonemic rules specific to a certain tone language. Its feasibility is exemplified for the African language Ibibio.

Full Paper   Presentation (pdf) with inline acoustic examples

Sound Examples
Natural Speech   Same Sentence Synthesized   Startup Effect   Downdrift  

Bibliographic reference.  Bachmann, Arne / Breuer, Stefan (2007): "Development of a BOSS unit selection module for tone languages", In SSW6-2007, 166-171.