Diphone synthesis using unit selection.

Abstract

This paper describes an experimental AT&T concatenative synthesis system using unit selection, for which the basic synthesis units are diphones. The synthesizer may use any of the data from a large database of utterances. Since there are in general multiple instances of each concatenative unit, the system performs dynamic unit selection. Selection among candidates is done dynamically at synthesis, in a manner that is based on and extends unit selection implemented in the CHATR synthesis system [1][4]. Selected units may be either phones or diphones, and they can be synthesized by a variety of methods, including PSOLA [5], HNM [11], and simple unit concatenation. The AT&T system, with CHATR unit selection, was implemented within the framework of the Festival Speech Synthesis System [2]. The voice database amounted to approximately one and one-half hours of speech and was constructed from read text taken from three sources. The first source was a portion of the 1989 Wall Street Journal m...