Abstract: A system and method is used to compress concatenative acoustic inventories for speech. Instead of using general purpose signal compression methods such as vector quantization, the method of the invention uses multiple properties of acoustic inventories to reduce the size of the acoustic inventories, such as the close acoustic match property and acoustic units that are labeled with sufficiently fine distinctions such that between any two phones no events occur that are substantially distinct from these two phones. The close acoustic match property is where acoustic units that share the same phone are acoustically similar at the points where these units may be concatenated. By utilizing multiple properties of acoustic units, the number of parameters per unit that are stored as LPC parameters are minimized. As a result, smaller storage devices may be used due to the reduction of the size of the storage requirements.

Abstract: A system and method for automatically computing pitch contours from a symbolic input, such as text that closely mimics pitch contours in natural speech. The method of the invention comprises estimating component contours, such as “phrase contours” and “accent contours”, from natural speech recordings. The phrase contours are associated with certain sequences of syllables, such as “feet”, or “accent groups.” A natural pitch contour is modeled as a mathematical combination. During synthesis, stored natural speech intervals are retrieved along with the corresponding accent curves. A temporal manipulation of the speech intervals performed by the synthesis algorithms, such as shortening or lengthening algorithms, is identically applied to the corresponding accent curves. The final output pitch contour is generated by mathematically combining (e.g., adding) the temporally manipulated accent curves to a phrase curve.

Abstract: A system and method is used to compress concatenative acoustic inventories for speech. Instead of using general purpose signal compression methods such as vector quantization, the method of the invention uses multiple properties of acoustic inventories to reduce the size of the acoustic inventories, such as the close acoustic match property and acoustic units that are labeled with sufficiently fine distinctions such that between any two phones no events occur that are substantially distinct from these two phones. The close acoustic match property is where acoustic units that share the same phone are acoustically similar at the points where these units may be concatenated. By utilizing multiple properties of acoustic units, the number of parameters per unit that are stored as LPC parameters are minimized. As a result, smaller storage devices may be used due to the reduction of the size of the storage requirements.