Title
Limited text speech synthesis with electroglottograph based on Bi-LSTM and modified Tacotron-2
Abstract
This paper proposes a framework of applying only the EGG signal for speech synthesis in the limited categories of contents scenario. EGG is a sort of physiological signal which can reflect the trends of the vocal cord movement. Note that EGG’s different acquisition method contrasted with speech signals, we exploit its application in speech synthesis under the following two scenarios. (1) To synthesize speeches under high noise circumstances, where clean speech signals are unavailable. (2) To enable dumb people who retain vocal cord vibration to speak again. Our study consists of two stages, EGG to text and text to speech. The first is a text content recognition model based on Bi-LSTM, which converts each EGG signal sample into the corresponding text with a limited class of contents. This model achieves 91.12% accuracy on the validation set in a 20-class content recognition experiment. Then the second step synthesizes speeches with the corresponding text and the EGG signal. Based on modified Tacotron-2, our model gains the Mel cepstral distortion (MCD) of 5.877 and the mean opinion score (MOS) of 3.87, which is comparable with the state-of-the-art performance and achieves an improvement by 0.42 and a relatively smaller model size than the origin Tacotron-2. Considering to introduce the characteristics of speakers contained in EGG to the final synthesized speech, we put forward a fine-grained fundamental frequency modification method, which adjusts the fundamental frequency according to EGG signals and achieves a lower MCD of 5.781 and a higher MOS of 3.94 than that without modification.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s10489-021-03075-x
Applied Intelligence
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Electroglottograph (EGG), Speech Synthesis, Bi-LSTM, Tacotron
Journal
52
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
13
0924-669X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
9
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lijiang Chen130423.22
Ren Jie200.34
Chen Pengfei300.34
Xia Mao4335.95
Qi Zhao5209.69