Speech Synthesis (U03222)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 10 ? Acronym : PPL-3-SS-LI

This course explores text-to-speech synthesis by taking a detailed look at the theory and practice of the state of the art speech synthesis systems. Through lectures students will learn the theory of speech synthesis through the lab sessions and assessment students will learn about the practical application of this theory as they design and build their own synthetic voice for a unit selection speech synthesiser. The syllabus include topics such as: approaches to speech synthesis, text selection and recording data for
corpus based approaches, searching inventories for unit selection approaches, prosody, pitch tracking, The Festival speech synthesis system architecture, speech coding for speech synthesis, parameter driven speech synthesis, evaluating speech synthesis and building a unit selection voice.

Entry Requirements

? Pre-requisites : Speech Processing U03221 or equivalent This course has a named level 11 version, if you are a Postgraduate Student you must take the PG version.

? Costs : None

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Language Sciences, (School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Schedule I)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : 3rd year

? Delivery Period : Semester 2 (Blocks 3-4)

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 11 weeks

First Class Information

Date	Start	End	Room	Area	Additional Information
13/01/2009	14:00	16:00			Rm 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building

All of the following classes

Type	Day	Start	End	Area
Lecture	Tuesday	14:00	15:50	Central
Laboratory	Friday	15:00	15:50	Central

? Additional Class Information : Class information:
Tues: Rm 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building
Friday: Lab 3.02 Appleton Tower

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

A student who has attended this course should

Understand the speech synthesis process, and be familiar with the processing steps required to convert text to speech.

Be familiar with the different speech synthesis methods currently used by speech synthesis systems and understand the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Have a detailed understanding of the principles of unit selection speech synthesis, and the issues involved with choosing suitable candidate units to match a given target sequence.

Understand the design issues associated with recording data suitable for building a unit selection voice.

Have the practical experience of having built a synthetic voice themselves.

Be familiar with the different speech coding techniques that can be used for speech synthesis, and understand how these can be used to aid the joining of individual speech segments and how using different signal processing techniques to manipulate speech synthesis output affects the speech quality.

Be in a position to discuss current issues in speech synthesis and see where speech synthesis research is heading in the future.