Forward masking phenomenon in concatenative speech synthesis

Abstract

The approach described in the paper tries to get more knowledge to the concatenative text-to-speech system design. The knowledge is based on masking phenomenon of the inner ear, particularly of its temporal (forward) masking properties. Designing such knowledge-based system is suggested to use in the unit selection-based speech synthesis, as contemporary a prominent technique in concatenative synthesis, which utilizes a big speech corpus. The more prosodic variability the corpus captures, the more natural a synthetic voice sounds and there are more possibilities to occur a forward masking events during concatenation of selected candidate units from the corpus.