Analysis of statistical parametric and unit selection speech synthesis systems applied to emotional speech

We have applied two state-of-the-art speech synthesis techniques (unit selection and HMM-based synthesis) to the synthesis of emotional speech. A series of carefully designed perceptual tests to evaluate speech quality, emotion identification rates and emotional strength were used for the six emotions which we recorded – happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust. For the HMM-based method, we evaluated spectral and source components separately and identified which components contribute to which emotion. Our analysis shows that, although the HMM method produces significantly better neutral speech, the two methods produce emotional speech of similar quality, except for emotions having context-dependent prosodic patterns. Whilst synthetic speech produced using the unit selection method has better emotional strength scores than the HMM-based method, the HMM-based method has the ability to manipulate the emotional strength. For emotions that are characterized by both spectral ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SPEECH
• Authors: Roberto Barra-Chicote, Junichi Yamagishi, Simon King, Juan Manuel Montero, Javier Macías Guarasa
• Keywords: Hmm-based Methods, SPEECH 2010, Unit Selection, Unit Selection Methods