A complete text-to-speech system has been created by the authors, based on a tube resonance model of the vocal tract and a development of Carré’s “Distinctive Region Model”, which is in turn based on the formant-sensitivity findings of Fant and Pauli (1974), to control the tube. In order to achieve this goal, significant long-term linguistic research has been involved, including rhythm and intonation studies, as well as the development of low-level articulatory data and rules to drive the model, together with the necessary tools, parsers, dictionaries and so on. The tools and the current system are available under a General Public License, and are described here, with further references in the paper, including samples of the speech produced, and figures illustrating the system description.
The Tube Resonance Model (TRM) synthesizer is an articulatory speech synthesizer implemented in software. It directly emulates the resonant behavior of the oropharyngeal and nasal tracts using digital waveguides. The oropharyngeal cavity is subdivided into 8 regions of unequal length, where particular regions correspond to the human articulators of tongue, teeth, and mouth. The radius (cross-sectional area) of each region can be varied independently over time. The differences in radii between regions gives rise to differences in acoustic impedance, which are modeled using two-way scattering junctions. The nasal cavity is composed of 5 equal-length sections, and is connected to the vocal tract via another section (the velum) using a three-way scattering junction. The total length of the tube can be varied over a continuous range, allowing one to synthesize male, female, and juvenile voices.
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