A Japanese text-to-speech conversion system has been developed, which can generate highly intelligible and natural synthetic speech from an arbitrary text written in Kanji characters (Chinese ideographs) by concatenating CV (C: consonant, V: vowel) and VC speech units. The system consists of a text analysis system and a speech synthesizer, constructed on compact hardware for a personal computer. To generate high quality synthetic speech, a pitch controlled residual wave excitation method is proposed, which uses residual waves as excitation signals for a synthesis filter in all portions of each speech unit. To realize natural rhythms, a phoneme duration rule has been created, based on statistical analysis of a large speech database. Evaluation experiments for the synthesizer were carried out. Results for the 100 syllable articulation test show an 88.8% accuracy rate and results for the 1,000 phonetically balanced word intelligibility test show a 97.4% accuracy.
Cite as: Iwata, K., Mitome, Y., Kametani, J., Akamatsu, M., Tomotake, S., Ozawa, K., Watanabe, T. (1990) A rule-based speech synthesizer using pitch controlled residual wave excitation method. Proc. First International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1990), 185-188, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1990-47
@inproceedings{iwata90_icslp,
author={Kazuhiko Iwata and Yukio Mitome and Jun Kametani and Minoru Akamatsu and Seimitsu Tomotake and Kazunori Ozawa and Takao Watanabe},
title={{A rule-based speech synthesizer using pitch controlled residual wave excitation method}},
year=1990,
booktitle={Proc. First International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1990)},
pages={185--188},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1990-47}
}