Symbolic vs. acoustics-based style control for expressive unit selection.
Ingmar Steiner, Marc L. Schröder, Marcela Charfuelàn, Annette Klepp · 2010
The present paper addresses the issue of flexibility in expressive unit selection speech synthesis by using different style selection techniques. We select units from a mixed-style unit selection database, using either forced style switching, no control, symbolic target cost, or acoustic target cost as a style selection criterion. We assess the effect of selection technique, feature weight and relative weight of target vs. join costs on a set of objective measures for style specificity and smoothness. Index Terms: expressive speech synthesis, unit selection, style control, voice quality, acoustic target cost