• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.5
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• pp.523-529
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• 2021

In this paper, we designed and developed an Emotional Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) processor. Multi-speaker emotional speech synthesis technology that can express multiple voice colors and emotional expressions have been developed, and we designed Emotional SSML by extending SSML for multiple voice colors and emotional expressions. The Emotional SSML processor has a graphic user interface and consists of following four components. First, a multi-speaker emotional text editor that can easily mark specific voice colors and emotions on desired positions. Second, an Emotional SSML document generator that creates an Emotional SSML document automatically from the result of the multi-speaker emotional text editor. Third, an Emotional SSML parser that parses the Emotional SSML document. Last, a sequencer to control a multi-speaker and emotional Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine based on the result of the Emotional SSML parser. Based on SSML which is a programming language and platform independent open standard, the Emotional SSML processor can easily integrate with various speech synthesis engines and facilitates the development of multi-speaker emotional text-to-speech applications.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.35-47
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• 1999

This paper describes procedures to model and synthesize emotional speech in a multimedia environment. At first, procedures to model the visual representation of emotional speech are proposed. To display the sequences of the images in synchronized form with speech, MSF(Multimedia Speech File) format is proposed and the display software is implemented. Then the emotional speech sinal is collected and analysed to obtain the prosodic characteristics of the emotional speech in limited domain. Multi-emotional sentences are spoken by actors. From the emotional speech signals, prosodic structures are compared in terms of the pseudo-syntactic structure. Based on the analyzed result, neutral speech is transformed into a specific emotinal state by modifying the prosodic structures.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.181-184
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• 2003

This paper explores the perceptual relevance of acoustical correlates of emotional speech by using formant synthesizer. The focus is on the role of mean pitch, pitch range, speed rate and phonation type when it comes to synthesizing emotional speech. The result of this research is backing up the traditional impressionistic observations. However it suggests that some phonation types should be synthesized with further refinement.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.3992-3998
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• 2013

This paper is related to the method of adding a emotional speech corpus to a high-quality large corpus based speech synthesizer, and generating various synthesized speech. We made the emotional speech corpus as a form which can be used in waveform concatenated speech synthesizer, and have implemented the speech synthesizer that can be generated various synthesized speech through the same synthetic unit selection process of normal speech synthesizer. We used a markup language for emotional input text. Emotional speech is generated when the input text is matched as much as the length of intonation phrase in emotional speech corpus, but in the other case normal speech is generated. The BIs(Break Index) of emotional speech is more irregular than normal speech. Therefore, it becomes difficult to use the BIs generated in a synthesizer as it is. In order to solve this problem we applied the Variable Break[3] modeling. We used the Japanese speech synthesizer for experiment. As a result we obtained the natural emotional synthesized speech using the break prediction module for normal speech synthesize.

• MALSORI
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• no.54
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• pp.45-61
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• 2005

In this paper, we present a method of generating intonation contour for Korean text-to-speech (TTS) system and a method of synthesizing emotional speech, both based on Soft template mark-up language (Stem-ML), a novel prosody generation model combining mark-up tags and pitch generation in one. The evaluation shows that the intonation contour generated by Stem-ML is better than that by our previous work. It is also found that Stem-ML is a useful tool for generating emotional speech, by controling limited number of tags. Large-size emotional speech database is crucial for more extensive evaluation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.614-620
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• 2019

In this paper, we propose a method to effectively determine the representative style embedding of each emotion class to improve the global style token-based end-to-end speech synthesis system. The emotion expressiveness of conventional approach was limited because it utilized only one style representative per each emotion. We overcome the problem by extracting multiple number of representatives per each emotion using a k-means clustering algorithm. Through the results of listening tests, it is proved that the proposed method clearly express each emotion while distinguishing one emotion from others.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.71-77
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• 2022

In this paper, a database is collected for extending the speech synthesis model to a model that synthesizes speech according to emotions and generating facial expressions. The database is divided into male and female data, and consists of emotional speech and facial expressions. Two professional actors of different genders speak sentences in Korean. Sentences are divided into four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and neutrality. Each actor plays about 3300 sentences per emotion. A total of 26468 sentences collected by filming this are not overlap and contain expression similar to the corresponding emotion. Since building a high-quality database is important for the performance of future research, the database is assessed on emotional category, intensity, and genuineness. In order to find out the accuracy according to the modality of data, the database is divided into audio-video data, audio data, and video data.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.5763-5768
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• 2014

Maintaining a voice color is important when compounding both the normal voice because an emotion is not expressed with various emotional voices in a single synthesizer. When a synthesizer is developed using the recording data of too many expressed emotions, a voice color cannot be maintained and each synthetic speech is can be heard like the voice of different speakers. In this paper, the speech data was recorded and the change in the voice color was analyzed to develop an emotional HMM-based speech synthesizer. To realize a speech synthesizer, a voice was recorded, and a database was built. On the other hand, a recording process is very important, particularly when realizing an emotional speech synthesizer. Monitoring is needed because it is quite difficult to define emotion and maintain a particular level. In the realized synthesizer, a normal voice and three emotional voice (Happiness, Sadness, Anger) were used, and each emotional voice consists of two levels, High/Low. To analyze the voice color of the normal voice and emotional voice, the average spectrum, which was the measured accumulated spectrum of vowels, was used and the F1(first formant) calculated by the average spectrum was compared. The voice similarity of Low-level emotional data was higher than High-level emotional data, and the proposed method can be monitored by the change in voice similarity.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.3473-3487
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• 2020

In this paper, we present a new approach to creating speech animation with emotional expressions using a small set of example models. To generate realistic facial animation, two example models called key visemes and expressions are used for lip-synchronization and facial expressions, respectively. The key visemes represent lip shapes of phonemes such as vowels and consonants while the key expressions represent basic emotions of a face. Our approach utilizes a text-to-speech (TTS) system to create a phonetic transcript for the speech animation. Based on a phonetic transcript, a sequence of speech animation is synthesized by interpolating the corresponding sequence of key visemes. Using an input parameter vector, the key expressions are blended by a method of scattered data interpolation. During the synthesizing process, an importance-based scheme is introduced to combine both lip-synchronization and facial expressions into one animation sequence in real time (over 120Hz). The proposed approach can be applied to diverse types of digital content and applications that use facial animation with high accuracy (over 90%) in speech recognition.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.89-95
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• 2016

The purpose of this work is to analyze and synthesize the pseudo-periodicity of voice using a source model. A speech signal has periodic characteristics; however, it is not completely periodic. While periodicity contributes significantly to the production of prosody, emotional status, etc., pseudo-periodicity contributes to the distinctions between normal and abnormal status, the naturalness of normal speech, etc. Measurement of pseudo-periodicity is typically performed through parameters such as jitter and shimmer. For studying the pseudo-periodic nature of voice in a controlled environment, through collected natural voice, we can only observe the distributions of the parameters, which are limited by the size of collected data. If we can generate voice samples in a controlled manner, experiments that are more diverse can be conducted. In this study, the probability distributions of vowel pitch variation are obtained from the speech signal. Based on the probability distribution of vocal folds, pulses with a designated jitter value are synthesized. Then, the target and re-analyzed jitter values are compared to check the validity of the method. It was found that the jitter synthesis method is useful for normal voice synthesis.