Abstract
Recently, methods for adding emotion to synthetic speech have received considerable attention in the field of speech synthesis research. We previously proposed a case-based method for generating emotional synthetic speech by exploiting the characteristics of the maximum amplitude and the utterance time of vowels, and the fundamental frequency of emotional speech. In the present study, we propose a method in which our reported method is further improved by controlling the fundamental frequency of emotional synthetic speech. As an initial investigation, we adopted the utterance of a Japanese name that is semantically neutral. By using the proposed method, emotional synthetic speech made from the emotional speech of one male subject was discriminable with a mean accuracy of 83.9 % when 18 subjects listened to the emotional synthetic utterances of “angry,” “happy,” “neutral,” “sad,” or “surprised” when the utterance was the Japanese name “Taro,” or “Hiroko.” Further adjustment of fundamental frequency in the proposed method made a much clearer impression on the subjects for emotional synthetic speech.
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We would like to thank all the participants who cooperated with us in the experiments.
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Boku, K., Asada, T., Yoshitomi, Y. et al. Speech synthesis of emotions using vowel features of a speaker. Artif Life Robotics 19, 27–32 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-013-0126-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-013-0126-9