Fifth ISCA ITRW on Speech Synthesis June 14-16, 2004 Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Towards Emotional Speech Synthesis: A Rule Based Approach

Enrico Zovato, Alberto Pacchiotti, Silvia Quazza, Stefano Sandri

Loquendo S.p.A., Vocal Technology and Services, Turin, Italy

This note describes a framework used to simulate three basic emotional styles by means of prosodic transplantation techniques applied to the output of a corpus based speech synthesis system. The target pitch profiles together with duration and energy constraints have been obtained applying simple rules inferred from the analysis of a small corpus, recorded in three emotional styles. Results of perceptual tests show that styles are well recognized even if the acoustical quality, in some cases, degrades.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Zovato, Enrico / Pacchiotti, Alberto / Quazza, Silvia / Sandri, Stefano (2004): "Towards emotional speech synthesis: a rule based approach", In SSW5-2004, 219-220.