Prosody modification using instants of significant excitation

Rao, K. Sreenivasa; Yegnanarayana, B.

doi:10.1109/tsa.2005.858051

Cited by 175 publications

(83 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…With the knowledge of the epochs, it is possible to determine the characteristics of the voice source by a careful analysis of the signal within a glottal pulse. The epochs can be used as pitch markers for prosody manipulation, which is useful in applications like text-to-speech synthesis, voice conversion and speech rate conversion [3], [4]. Knowledge of the epoch locations may be used for estimating the time-delay between speech signals collected over a pair of spatially distributed microphones [5].…”

Section: A Significance Of Epochs In Speech Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Epoch Extraction From Speech Signals

Murty

Yegnanarayana

2008

IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process.

Self Cite

560

288

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-Epoch is the instant of significant excitation of the vocal-tract system during production of speech. For most voiced speech, the most significant excitation takes place around the instant of glottal closure. Extraction of epochs from speech is a challenging task due to time-varying characteristics of the source and the system. Most epoch extraction methods attempt to remove the characteristics of the vocal-tract system, in order to emphasize the excitation characteristics in the residual. The performance of such methods depends critically on our ability to model the system. In this paper, we propose a method for epoch extraction which does not depend critically on characteristics of the time-varying vocaltract system. The method exploits the nature of impulse-like excitation. The proposed zero resonance frequency filter output brings out the epoch locations with high accuracy and reliability. The performance of the method is demonstrated using CMU-Arctic database using the epoch information from the electro-glottograph as reference. The proposed method performs significantly better than the other methods currently available for epoch extraction. The interesting part of the results is that the epoch extraction by the proposed method seems to be robust against degradations like white noise, babble, high-frequency channel, and vehicle noise.

show abstract

Section: A Significance Of Epochs In Speech Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Epoch Extraction From Speech Signals

Murty

Yegnanarayana

2008

IEEE Trans. Audio Speech Lang. Process.

Self Cite

560

288

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Thirdly, some neutral sentences had unsatisfactory prosody. The quality was improved by modifying the prosody with algorithms for pitch and duration modification [11] [12], speech normalization and energy correction. Some of these algorithms were integrated into the Festival framework for increased automation.…”

Section: Improvements Made On the Baseline Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Corpus Based Emotional Speech Synthesis in Hindi

Bhakat

Narendra

Rao

2013

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract. This paper explores a unit selection based concatenative approach towards emotional speech synthesis in Hindi. The emotions explored are sad and neutral. The Festival framework is used as the underlying Text-To-Speech (TTS) system. The various steps which are followed to create a new voice in Festival are described here. The developed TTS systems are evaluated by subjective evaluation tests. These tests indicate a significant improvement in the quality of synthesis after necessary prosody modifications. Finally, possible improvements which can be made on the systems are put forward.

show abstract

“…These methods produce some spectral and phase distortions, mainly due to manipulation of the speech signal directly. In [6], the authors have proposed an epoch-based time scale modification method, where the duration of speech signal is modified using the knowledge of epochs. Here, the epoch refers to the instant of glottal closure, where significant excitation takes place in each glottal cycle.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the method proposed in [6], the TSM is performed by modifying the entire speech signal uniformly. In general, it is observed that all speech regions do not change uniformly with changes in the speech rate.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Duration modification using glottal closure instants and vowel onset points

Rao

Yegnanarayana

2009

Speech Communication

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper proposes a method for duration (time scale) modification using Glottal Closure Instants (GCI, also known as instants of significant excitation) and Vowel Onset Points (VOP). In general, most of the time scale modification methods attempt to vary the duration of speech segments uniformly over all regions. But it is observed that consonant regions and transition regions between a consonant and the following vowel, and between two consonant regions do not vary appreciably with speaking rate. The proposed method implements the duration modification without changing the durations of the transition and consonant regions. Vowel onset points are used to identify the transition and consonant regions. A VOP is the instant at which the onset of the vowel takes place, which corresponds to the transition from a consonant to the following vowel in most cases. The VOPs are computed using the Hilbert envelope of Linear Prediction (LP) residual. The instants of significant excitation correspond to the instants of glottal closure (epochs) in the case of voiced speech, and to some random excitations, like the onset of burst, in the case of nonvoiced speech. Manipulation of duration is achieved by modifying the duration of the LP residual with the help of instants of significant excitation as pitch markers. The modified residual is used to excite the time-varying filter whose parameters are derived from the original speech signal. Perceptual quality of the synthesized speech is found to be natural. Performance of the proposed method is compared with the method, where the duration of speech is modified uniformly over all regions. Samples of speech signals for different modification factors is available for listening at

show abstract

Prosody modification using instants of significant excitation

Cited by 175 publications

References 20 publications

Epoch Extraction From Speech Signals

Epoch Extraction From Speech Signals

Corpus Based Emotional Speech Synthesis in Hindi

Duration modification using glottal closure instants and vowel onset points

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About