This paper describes a pioneer study on prosodic control for Cantonese text-to-speech synthesis. We attempt to establish a set of segment-level duration rules and context-dependent F0 profiles and apply them to a syllable-based concatenative speech synthesizer which uses TD-PSOLA as prosodic modification technique. The prosodic features are extracted by statistical characterization of a large amount of speech data. Subjective listening test shows that the micro-prosodic control results in a marginal but consistent improvement in perceptual naturalness.
Cite as: Lee, T., Meng, H.M., Lau, W.H., Lo, W.K., Ching, P.C. (1999) Micro-prosodic control in cantonese text-to-speech synthesis. Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999), 1855-1858, doi: 10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-405
@inproceedings{lee99_eurospeech,
author={Tan Lee and Helen M. Meng and Wai H. Lau and W. K. Lo and P. C. Ching},
title={{Micro-prosodic control in cantonese text-to-speech synthesis}},
year=1999,
booktitle={Proc. 6th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (Eurospeech 1999)},
pages={1855--1858},
doi={10.21437/Eurospeech.1999-405}
}