Concatenative sound synthesis: The early years

Abstract

Concatenative sound synthesis is a promising method of musical sound synthesis with a steady stream of work and publications for over five years now. This article offers a comparative survey and taxonomy of the many different approaches to concatenative synthesis throughout the history of electronic music, starting in the 1950s, even if they weren't known as such at their time, up to the recent surge of contemporary methods. Concatenative sound synthesis methods use a large database of source sounds, segmented into units, and a unit selection algorithm that finds the units that match best the sound or musical phrase to be synthesised, called the target. The selection is performed according to the descriptors of the units. These are characteristics extracted from the source sounds, e.g. pitch, or attributed to them, e.g. instrument class. The selected units are then transformed to fully match the target specification, and concatenated. However, if the database is sufficiently large, the probability is high that a matching unit will be found, so the need to apply transformations is reduced. The most urgent and interesting problems for further work on concatenative synthesis are listed concerning segmentation, descriptors, efficiency, legality, data mining, and real time interaction. Finally, the conclusion tries to provide some insight into the current and future state of concatenative synthesis research.

Efficient Model for Numerical Text-To-Speech Synthesis System in Marathi, Hindi and English Languages

“…Its sampling frequency of speech units is 20 KHz (22, 050 Hz). Two extra things of acoustic level are added such as one mono channel and wave file format for analyzed and synthesized [6]. One male or female speaker is enough for this model.…”

“…985.92 should be translated into a stream of phones using a graphemeto-phoneme as ‗nine hundred eighty-five and ninety-two coins' in English, ‗ ' in Marathi, ‗ ' in Hindi. The numerical parts of speech can be recognized but it needs speech library [3][4][5][6][15][16][17][18][19]. The next section can be seen how to prepare speech library.…”

“…The prosodic features are to apply on the numeric style. The form of numeric style is converted into the stream of phonemes using the rules of Indian numbers system [6]. Alternatively, the synthesizer can incorporate a model of the vocal tract.…”

Towards user-friendly audio creation

“…A very common technique for texture synthesis is the data driven concatenative synthesis, also referred to as mosaicing [11]. Concatenative synthesis approaches aim at generating a meaningful macroscopic waveform structure from a large number of shorter waveforms.…”

“…Another class of control methods relies on a wise visualization of the grains database in order to adequately select them. In Catart, Schwarz proposes to display the grains in a two-dimensional space according to descriptor values or output of dimension reduction techniques such as multidimensional scaling analysis or principal component analysis [11].…”