GSLT Speech Synthesis Lectures & Hands-on exercises The objective of the lectures and tutorials is to give an overview of the history and state-of-the-art in speech synthesis. This is a preliminary overview of the lectures and seminars in the course. Literature: TTS = "Text-to-speech synthesis" by Taylor, P. (2007) Klatt = Review of text-to-speech conversion for English by Klatt, D. (1987). Preliminary lecture notes for Seminar days 1-2 Seminar day 1: 8/9 Lecture 1: Introduction and history Content: Presentation and overview of the course. A short history of the development of early speech synthesizers and different synthesis techniques. Literature: TTS 1 + Klatt OVE Demo instructions Content: Source and filter manipulation. Lecture 2: Analysis and manipulation of speech Content: Source and filters, Linear Prediction analysis, Cepstrums, Spectral envelope Literature: TTS 12 Lecture 3: Concatenative speech synthesis Content: Concatenation units, creating a unit database, the PSOLA and MBROLA algorithms Literature: TTS 14 Hands-on 1: Diphone "synthesis" Content: Computer exercise in creating and manipulating diphones for a simple sentence Lecture 4: Unit selection synthesis Content: Multiple entry databases, fixed or variable unit lengths, the Hunt and Black algorithm, target cost, join cost, concatenation cost, choice of features, search and pruning. Literature: TTS 16, 17.1 Lecture 5: HMM synthesis Content: Observation probabilities, delta coefficients, states and transistions, training, speaker adaptation, Swedish HMM synthesis Literature: TTS 15 Lecture 6: From text Content: Segmenting and decoding a text. Generating phonemes and prosody from text. Markup of texts for speech synthesis Literature: TTS (2), 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 Seminar day 2: 21/10 Lecture 7: Vocal tract models Content: Creating a vocal tract model, corpus-based articulatory synthesis, tubes, area functions, equivalent circuit theory Literature: TTS 7, 10, 11, 13.4 Hands-on 2: Vocal tract models Content: Computer exercises using simple vocal tract models to synthesize vowels Lecture 8: Formant synthesis Content: Digital resonators, formants and bandwidths, synthesis by rule, data-driven formant synthesis Literature: TTS 10, 13 Hands-on 3: Speaker characteristics in formant synthesis Content: Computer exercises with the RULSYS TTS plug-in to Wavesurfer. Lecture 9: Evaluation Content: Different types of evaluation, intelligibility, naturalness, listening tests, mean opinion score, preference score. Literature: TTS 17.2 Lecture 10: Speech synthesis of the future Content:Speaker adaptation, emotions, concept-to-speech . Seminar day 3: Closing Seminar: 15/12? Content: Term paper presentations, home-assignment correction, course evaluation. Course responsible: Olov Engwall, engwall@kth.se, 790 75 65