title: Voice quality modelling for expressive speech synthesis.
abstract: This paper presents the perceptual experiments that were carried out in order to validate the methodology of transforming expressive speech styles using voice quality (VoQ) parameters modelling, along with the well-known prosody (F 0, duration, and energy), from a neutral style into a number of expressive ones. The main goal was to validate the usefulness of VoQ in the enhancement of expressive synthetic speech in terms of speech quality and style identification. A harmonic plus noise model (HNM) was used to modify VoQ and prosodic parameters that were extracted from an expressive speech corpus. Perception test results indicated the improvement of obtained expressive speech styles using VoQ modelling along with prosodic characteristics.
authors.affiliation: Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunication Studies, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), Rambla del Poblenou 156, 08018 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-3883-3588
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Monzo
authors.affiliation: Grup de Recerca en Tecnologies Mèdia (GTM), Universitat Ramon Llull, La Salle, Quatre Camins 2, 08022 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Ignasi
authors.identifier: 0000-0003-2467-4192
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Iriondo
authors.affiliation: Grup de Recerca en Tecnologies Mèdia (GTM), Universitat Ramon Llull, La Salle, Quatre Camins 2, 08022 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Joan Claudi
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Socoró
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D049250:Speech Recognition Software; D014831:Voice