ISCA Archive SPM 1996
ISCA Archive SPM 1996

A self-learning speech synthesis system

C. S. Blackburn, Steven J. Young

We describe a self-organising pseudo-articulatory speech production model (SPM), and present recent results when training the system on an X-ray microbeam database. The SPM extracts statistics describing articulator positions and curvatures during the production of continuous speech, then applies an explicit co-articulation model to generate synthetic articulator trajectories corresponding to time-aligned phonemic strings. A set of artificial neural networks estimates parameterised speech vectors from the synthetic articulator traces. We present an analysis of the articulatory information in the X-ray microbeam database used, and demonstrate the improvements in articulatory and acoustic modelling accuracy obtained using our co-articulation system.