Speech Segment Selection for Concatenative Synthesis Based on Spectral Distortion Minimization

This paper proposes a new scheme for concatenative speech synthesis to improve the speech segment selection procedure. The proposed scheme selects a segment sequence for concatenation by minimizing acoustic distortions between the selected segment and the desired spectrum for the target without the use of heuristics. Four types of distortion, a) the spectral prototypically of a segment, b) the spectral difference between the source and target contexts, c) the degradation resulting from concatenation of phonemes, and d) the acoustic discontinuity between the concatenated segments, are formulated as acoustic quantities, and used as measures for minimization. A search method for selecting segments from a large speech database is also described. In this method, a three-step optimization using dynamic programming is used to minimize the four types of distortion. A perceptual test shows that this proposed segment selection method with minimum distortion criteria produces high quality synthesized speech, and that contextual spectral difference and acoustic discontinuity at the segment boundary are important measures for improving the quality.