Undergraduate Course: Speech Synthesis (LASC10062)
Course Outline
| School | School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course explores issues in text-to-speech synthesis by taking a detailed look at the theory and practice of state of the art speech synthesis systems. Through lectures students will learn the theory of speech synthesis. In the lab sessions and coursework students will learn about the practical application of this theory as they design, build, and evaluate their own synthetic voice. The syllabus starts from unit selection approaches then builds up to the current state of the art using neural networks. Other topics covered include: creating the data required for unit selection or for training a neural network, speech signal processing, and evaluating speech synthesis. |
| Course description |
The course is delivered as a combination of lectures, flipped classrooms, an online forum, short videos, readings, and a practical exercise in the lab.
In the lab, students build their own fully-functional speech synthesis voice, within the Festival framework.
Syllabus: approaches to speech synthesis, text selection and recording data for corpus based approaches, searching inventories for unit selection approaches, prosody, pitch tracking and pitch marking, speech coding and vocoding for speech synthesis, statistical parametric speech synthesis using Hidden Markov models, statistical parametric speech synthesis using Deep Neural Networks, evaluating speech synthesis.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
Students MUST have passed:
Speech Processing (Hons) (LASC10061)
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should have completed at least 3 Linguistics/Language Sciences courses at grade B or above . We will only consider University/College level courses. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2023/24, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: None |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 18,
Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 9,
Summative Assessment Hours 2,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
167 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Two written assignments worth 50% each |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Understand the speech synthesis process, and be familiar with the processing steps required to convert text to speech.
- Be familiar with the two main speech synthesis methods currently in use, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each.
- Have a detailed understanding of the principles of unit selection speech synthesis, and the issues involved in 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 practical experience of building a synthetic voice.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Simon King
Tel: (0131 6)51 1725
Email: |
Course secretary | Miss Anna Jarvis
Tel:
Email: |
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