[hts-users:00200] Re: emotional speech synthesis using hts

["Heiga ZEN (Byung Ha CHUN)" <zen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

liulei_198216@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> I have read some papers about emotional speech synthesis, and now,I know 
> that hts uses "model interpolation" and "speaker adaptation" to 
> synthesize  motional speech and speech with various styles.

Yes.

> About "speaker adaptation" , it refers that  for synthesizing speech 
> with various styles, we must  convert speech feature including spectrum, 
> F0,duration.

Actually wee do not need to convert speech features themselves, we need to convert "statistics" (model parameters) of 
these features.

> But when I want to synthesize emotional speech, is it necessary to 
> convert spectrum.
> Is it enough that getting emotional speech through converting F0 ,duration.

In my opinion, converting spectrum will help to synthesize emotional speech.

> In addition, how can I get a real-time emotional convertion, for example 
> from sad to happy.
> Certainly we can use "model interpolation" and "speaker adaptation", 
> but  they need time in  the  training part.

For speaker interpolation you have to prepare a number of models using sufficient emotional speech samples.
Recording speech and training HMMs may take some time.
On the other hand, for speaker adaptation you only need one set of HMMs trained using neutral speech and a few emotional 
speech samples for adaptation.
Speaker (emotion) adaptation can be done off-line, so synthesizing emotional speech does not require any additional time.
You can also use adapted models for interpolation.

> does anyone know "speech synthesis driven by emotional function " ?

I don't know what "emotional function" is.
In the HMM-based speech synthesis system with MLLR-based speaker (emotion) adaptation, I think linear transformation 
matrices for mean and variances of the HMMs can be viewed as the functions to represent the relationships between 
neutral and emotional speech.

Best regards,

Heiga Zen (Byung Ha Chun)

--
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  Heiga ZEN     (in Japanese pronunciation)
  Byung-Ha CHUN (in Korean pronunciation)

  Department of Computer Science and Engineering
  Graduate School of Engineering
  Nagoya Institute of Technology
  Japan

  e-mail: zen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     web: http://kt-lab.ics.nitech.ac.jp/~zen
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