On the reduction of concatenation artefacts in diphone synthesis
Esther Klabbers, Raymond N. J. Veldhuis · 1998
One well-known problem with diphone concatenation is the occurrence of audible discontinuities at diphone boundaries, which are most prominent in vowels and semi-vowels. Significant formant jumps at certain boundaries suggest that the problem is of a spectral nature. We have examined this hypothesis by correlating the results of a listening experiment with spectral distances measured across diphone boundaries. The aim is to find a spectral distance measure that best predicts when discontinuities are audible in order to find out how the diphone database can best be extended with context-sensitive diphones. The results show that the KullbackLeibler measure is the best predictor. 1. INTRODUCTION Most speech synthesis systems available today are based on diphone concatenation. One well-known problem with diphone concatenation is the occurrence of audible discontinuities at diphone boundaries, which are most prominent in vowels and semi-vowels and are caused by contextual influences. Our ...