[hts-users:00574] F0 contours become flat

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

Hi all,

Today I attended a Japanese domestic conference and had a presentation about HTS 2.0.
At that time, some people reported me that F0 contours generated from the HMMs trained by HTS 2.0 are flatter than those generated from the HMMs trained by HTS 1.1.1.

I think this is caused by variance flooring in tree-based clustering.
In the previous versions, we didn't care about variance flooring during clustering procedure.
However, at the Blizzard Challenge 2005, we found that variance flooring in clustering made synthesized speech more stable.
So we incorporated this into HTS 2.0.
But it makes tree a bit small and generated F0 contours flat.

If you want to avoid this problem, please set %lamb in scripts/Config.pm

%lamb = ('mcp' => "1.0",  # tree size control param. for MDL
        'lf0' => "1.0",
        'dur' => "1.0");

to less than 1.0.
This makes trees larger.

Thank you very much,

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
Nagoya Institute of Technology
Gokiso-cho, Showa-ku, Nagoya 466-8555 Japan

http://www.sp.nitech.ac.jp/~zen
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