Re: [gnuspeech-contact] Early GNUSpeech observations

[David Hill]

Hi Jason,

On Apr 9, 2009, at 7:37 PM, Jason White wrote:

In the current, partially ported, version the intonation tends to rise sharply

until punctuation is encountered. I have noticed, however, that the parsing

code inserts markers into the phonetic string which is forwarded to the rest

of the synthesizer for processing, and I surmise that these affect, among

other parameters, the intonation. Thus I will listen again when the parser has

been ported and refined.

A quick comment on this observation of yours.  In Monet, there is an "Intonation Parameters" tool, which allows you to change the parameters of the intonation.  If you reduce the "Pretonic Range" to (say) 3, from 5, the speech doesn't sound so frenetic.  You can play around with all the parameters which alter ranges, notional pitch and such for the various components of the Halliday intonation framework for Spoken English.

The latest version of Monet has two input windows.  One is for ordinary text, and the other shows the resulting Monet "phonetic" input, with various added information for the intonation if you select "Parse Text".  When you "Synthesize", it is the "phonetic" input that gets spoken.

We're working on various aspects of the whole gnuspeech suite as you know.  I have just made a 0.7 version of "Synthesizer" available and Dalmazio has put it into the SVN repository (thanks Dalmazio).  "Synthesizer", you may remember, is an application to allow a user to experiment with the raw tube model that provides the vocal tract emulation.  It is also a tool that is needed when creating the synthesis databases for a new language using Monet.

All good wishes.

david

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David Hill

address@hidden

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnuspeech

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