Diphthong Synthesis Using the Dynamic 3D Digital Waveguide Mesh

TY - JOUR

T1 - Diphthong Synthesis Using the Dynamic 3D Digital Waveguide Mesh

AU - Gully, Amelia Jane

AU - Daffern, Helena

AU - Murphy, Damian Thomas

N1 - © 2017 IEEE. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.

PY - 2018/2

Y1 - 2018/2

N2 - Articulatory speech synthesis has the potential to offer more natural sounding synthetic speech than established concatenative or parametric synthesis methods. Time-domain acoustic models are particularly suited to the dynamic nature of the speech signal, and recent work has demonstrated the potential of dynamic vocal tract models that accurately reproduce the vocal tract geometry. This paper presents a dynamic 3D digital waveguide mesh (DWM) vocal tract model, capable of movement to produce diphthongs. The technique is compared to existing dynamic 2D and static 3D DWM models, for both monophthongs and diphthongs. The results indicate that the proposed model provides improved formant accuracy over existing DWM vocal tract models. Furthermore, the computational requirements of the proposed method are significantly lower than those of comparable dynamic simulation techniques. This paper represents another step toward a fully functional articulatory vocal tract model which will lead to more natural speech synthesis systems for use across society.

AB - Articulatory speech synthesis has the potential to offer more natural sounding synthetic speech than established concatenative or parametric synthesis methods. Time-domain acoustic models are particularly suited to the dynamic nature of the speech signal, and recent work has demonstrated the potential of dynamic vocal tract models that accurately reproduce the vocal tract geometry. This paper presents a dynamic 3D digital waveguide mesh (DWM) vocal tract model, capable of movement to produce diphthongs. The technique is compared to existing dynamic 2D and static 3D DWM models, for both monophthongs and diphthongs. The results indicate that the proposed model provides improved formant accuracy over existing DWM vocal tract models. Furthermore, the computational requirements of the proposed method are significantly lower than those of comparable dynamic simulation techniques. This paper represents another step toward a fully functional articulatory vocal tract model which will lead to more natural speech synthesis systems for use across society.

KW - Speech synthesis

KW - digital waveguide mesh

KW - diphthongs

KW - numerical acoustic modeling

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85035745874&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1109/TASLP.2017.2774921

DO - 10.1109/TASLP.2017.2774921

M3 - Article

SN - 2329-9290

VL - 26

SP - 243

EP - 255

JO - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing

JF - IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing

IS - 2

M1 - 8114217

ER -