Spectrum modification for emotional speech synthesis

Abstract

Emotional state of a speaker is accompanied by physiological changes affecting respiration, phonation, and articulation. These changes are manifested mainly in prosodic patterns of F0, energy, and duration, but also in segmental parameters of speech spectrum. Therefore, our new emotional speech synthesis method is supplemented with spectrum modification. It comprises non-linear frequency scale transformation of speech spectral envelope, filtering for emphasizing low or high frequency range, and controlling of spectral noise by spectral flatness measure according to knowledge of psychological and phonetic research. The proposed spectral modification is combined with linear modification of F0 mean, F0 range, energy, and duration. Speech resynthesis with applied modification that should represent joy, anger and sadness is evaluated by a listening test. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.