Paper Info
Title
Investigating the role of phoneme-level modifications in emotional speech resynthesis
Abstract
Recent studies in our lab show that emotions in speech are man- ifested as, besides supra-segmental trends, distinct variations in phoneme-level prosodic and spectral parameters. In this pa- per, we further investigate the significance of this finding in the context of emotional speech synthesis. Specifically, we study phoneme-level signal property manipulation in transforming the emotional information conveyed in a speech utterance. We ana- lyze the effect of individual and combined modifications of F0, duration, energy and spectrum using data recorded by a pro- fessional actress with happy, angry, sad and neutral expressive- ness. We use content matched source-target pairs and apply TD- PSOLA for prosody and LPC for spectrum modifications by di- rectly extracting the required parameters from the target speech. Listening tests conducted with 10 naive raters show that modi- fication of prosody and spectral envelope parameters by them- selves is not sufficient. However, when applied together, modi- fying spectrum and prosody at the phone level gives successful results for most emotion pairs, except conversion to happy tar- gets. We also observe that at the phoneme level, spectral enve- lope modifications are more effective than local prosodic mod- ifications; and that, duration modifications are more effective than pitch modifications. The results confirm our hypothesis that phoneme level modifications can be used to fine tune the ensuing suprasegmental-parameter-based modifications to im- prove the overall quality of synthesized emotions.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2005
INTERSPEECH
spectrum,speech synthesis
Field
DocType
Citations 
Prosody,Speech synthesis,Spectral envelope,Computer science,Active listening,Utterance,Speech recognition,Phone,Expressivity
Conference
15
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.88
11
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Murtaza Bulut184839.45
Carlos Busso2161693.04
Serdar Yildirim352330.10
Abe Kazemzadeh495752.95
Chul Min Lee584953.76
Sungbok Lee6139484.13
Narayanan Shrikanth75558439.23