Festival Speech Synthesis System: - Speech Resource Pages

After prediction the segmental duration is calculated by the simple formula
duration = mean + (zscore * standard deviation)
For some other duration models that affect an inherent duration by some factor this method has been used. If the tree
predicts factors rather than zscores and the duration_ph_info entries are phone, 0.0, inherent duration. The
above formula will generate the desired result. Klatt and Klatt-like rules can be implemented in the this way without
adding a new method.
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20. UniSyn synthesizer
Since 1.3 a new general synthesizer module has been included. This designed to replace the older diphone
synthesizer described in the next chapter. A redesign was made in order to have a generalized waveform synthesizer,
singla processing module that could be used even when the units being concatenated are not diphones. Also at this
stage the full diphone (or other) database pre-processing functions were added to the Speech Tool library.
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20.1 UniSyn database format
The Unisyn synthesis modules can use databases in two basic formats, separate and grouped. Separate is when all
files (signal, pitchmark and coefficient files) are accessed individually during synthesis. This is the standard use
during databse development. Group format is when a database is collected together into a single special file
containing all information necessary for waveform synthesis. This format is designed to be used for distribution and
general use of the database.
A database should consist of a set of waveforms, (which may be translated into a set of coefficients if the desired the
signal processing method requires it), a set of pitchmarks and an index. The pitchmarks are necessary as most of our
current signal processing are pitch synchronous.
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20.1.1 Generating pitchmarks
Pitchmarks may be derived from laryngograph files using the our proved program `pitchmark' distributed with
the speech tools. The actual parameters to this program are still a bit of an art form. The first major issue is which
direction the lar files. We have seen both, though it does seem to be CSTR's ones are most often upside down while
others (e.g. OGI's) are the right way up. The -inv argument to `pitchmark' is specifically provided to cater for
this. There other issues in getting the pitchmarks aligned. The basic command for generating pitchmarks is
pitchmark -inv lar/file001.lar -o pm/file001.pm -otype est \
-min 0.005 -max 0.012 -fill -def 0.01 -wave_end
The `-min', `-max' and `-def' (fill values for unvoiced regions), may need to be changed depending on the
speaker pitch range. The above is suitable for a male speaker. The `-fill' option states that unvoiced sections
should be filled with equally spaced pitchmarks.