A study on the consistency analysis of energy parameter for Mandarin speech

• Published in: EURASIP journal on audio, speech, and music processing Vol. 2012; no. 1; pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Shen, Li-Te, Yeh, Cheng-Yu, Hwang, Shaw-Hwa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 17.12.2012; Springer Nature B.V; BioMed Central Ltd
• Subjects: Acoustics; Algorithms; Consistency; Engineering; Engineering Acoustics; Mandarins; Mathematical models; Mathematics in Music; Segments; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Speech; Syllables; Warping; Hidden Markov Model (HMM); Vector quantization (VQ); Speech synthesis; Text-to-speech (TTS); Consistency analysis
• ISSN: 1687-4722; 1687-4714; 1687-4722
• DOI: 10.1186/1687-4722-2012-28

In this study, a consistency analysis of energy parameter for Mandarin speech is presented. Identified as a result of inspection of the human pronunciation process, the consistency can be interpreted as a high correlation of a warping curve between the spectrum and the prosody intra a syllable. Through three steps in the procedure of the consistency analysis, the hidden Markov model (HMM) algorithm is used first to decode HMM-state sequences within a syllable at the same time as to divide them into three segments. Second, based on a designated syllable, the vector quantization (VQ) with the Linde–Buzo–Gray algorithm is used to train the VQ codebooks of each segment. Third, the energy vector of each segment is encoded as an index by VQ codebooks, and then the probability of each possible path is evaluated as a prerequisite to analyze the consistency. It is demonstrated experimentally that a consistency is definitely acquired in case the syllable is located exactly in the same word. These results offer a research direction that the energy warping process intra a syllable must be considered in a text-to-speech system to improve the synthesized speech quality.