| EPSRC Reference: |
GR/N13166/01 |
| Title: |
IMPROVING CONCATENTATIVE SYNTHESIS THROUGH AN ANALYSIS OF SPEAKING STYLE, DATABASE DESIGN AND UNIT SELECTION |
| Principal Investigator: |
Cawley, Dr G |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Department: |
Computing Sciences |
| Organisation: |
University of East Anglia |
| Scheme: |
Standard Research (Pre-FEC) |
| Starts: |
28 July 2000 |
Ends: |
27 April 2004 |
Value (£): |
60,988
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Human Communication in ICT |
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| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
| Creative Industries |
No relevance to Underpinning Sectors |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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The project would investigate aspects of voice quality and speaking style, which effect the process of unit selection in concatenative synthesis. This research would be used to develop new and more robust methods of capturing and encoding individual speakers and speaking styles. The results of this research would greatly simplify the processes of tailoring and selecting individual voices for inclusion in synthesisers. In addition, the project would undertake research into the development of a method of transplanting natural prosody. In this process, a sentence to be synthesised would first be recorded by an individual, this recording would then be analysed and the results used within the text to speech system to generate the prosody for that sentence. The voice however would be that of the synthesiser not of the recorded speaker. This work not only provides an invaluable insight into the limitations of the speech synthesis process; it also has a number of innovative commercial applications. Progress will be monitored using subjective tests, which will be conducted throughout the lifetime of the project.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.uea.ac.uk |