Control concepts for articulatory speech synthesis

Abstract

We present two concepts for the generation of gestural scores to control an articulatory speech synthesizer. Gestural scores are the common input to the synthesizer and constitute an or- ganized pattern of articulatory gestures. The first concept gen- erates the gestures for an utterance using the phonetic transcrip- tions, phone durations, and intonation commands predicted by the Bonn Open Synthesis System (BOSS) from an arbitrary in- put text. This concept extends the synthesizerto a text-to-speech synthesis system. The idea of the second concept is to use tim- ing informationextracted from ElectromagneticArticulography signals to generate the articulatory gestures. Therefore, it is a concept for the re-synthesis of natural utterances. Finally, ap- plication prospects for the presented synthesizer are discussed.