ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1999

Development of an emotional speech synthesiser in Spanish

J. M. Montero, J. Gutiérrez-Arriola, J. Colás, J. Macías-Guarasa, E. Enríquez, Juan Manuel Pardo

Currently, an essential point in speech synthesis is the addressing of the variability of human speech. One of the main sources of this diversity is the emotional state of the speaker. Most of the recent work in this area has been focused on the prosodic aspects of speech and on rule-based formant-synthesis experiments. Even when adopting an improved voice source, we cannot achieve a smiling happy voice or the menacing quality of cold anger. For this reason, we have performed two experiments aimed at developing a concatenative emotional synthesiser, a synthesiser that can copy the quality of an emotional voice without an explicit mathematical model.