INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Discrete/Continuous Modelling of Speaking Style in HMM-Based Speech Synthesis: Design and Evaluation

Nicolas Obin (1), Pierre Lanchantin (1), Anne Lacheret (2), Xavier Rodet (1)

(1) IRCAM, France
(2) MoDyCo, France

This paper assesses the ability of a HMM-based speech synthesis systems to model the speech characteristics of various speaking styles1. A discrete/continuous HMM is presented to model the symbolic and acoustic speech characteristics of a speaking style. The proposed model is used to model the average characteristics of a speaking style that is shared among various speakers, depending on specific situations of speech communication. The evaluation consists of an identification experiment of 4 speaking styles based on delexicalized speech, and compared to a similar experiment on natural speech. The comparison is discussed and reveals that discrete/continuous HMM consistently models the speech characteristics of a speaking style.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Obin, Nicolas / Lanchantin, Pierre / Lacheret, Anne / Rodet, Xavier (2011): "Discrete/continuous modelling of speaking style in HMM-based speech synthesis: design and evaluation", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2785-2788.