Synthesis by rule of Japanese

Abstract

Based on an analysis of a corpus of recorded CVCV syllables and several paragraphs [C. Aoki, D. Klatt, and H. Kawasaki, “Acoustic‐Phonetic Analysis of Japanese,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 75, S60 (1984)], as well as a study of the prior literature on analysis and synthesis of Japanese, we have formulated a set of synthesis rules within the general framework used in DECtalk. Input to the system must be specified phonemically. The program is divided into several subprograms that (1) parse this string into phoneroes and associated structural/accent features, (2) apply phonological rules to select appropriate allophones or delete segments, (3) assign a duration to each segment, (4) specify onset times and strength of pitch rises and falls, (5) compute 17 time functions to control a formant synthesizer on the basis of stored tables of phonetic target values and smoothing time constants, and, finally, (6) compute a waveform from the control parameter specification. The program has been optimized by systematic spectral/waveform comparisons between the synthetic output and recordings of a selected model speaker. The oral presentation will emphasize differences between the English and Japanese synthesis systems. A demonstration will be played. [Work supported in part by an NIH grant.]