VieCtoS: Phonology-Acoustics Mapping for Concept-to-Speech
In this nationally sponsored project (Austrian Science Foundation),
a prototype of a concept-to-speech system was
developed able to produce German utterances from a symbolic representation
that contains word-specific information (phonemes, word accent, syllable
structure) as well as abstract prosodic information. The representation is
based on the autosegmental phonologic theory of Pierrehumbert which can be
considered a de-facto standard of prosodic notation. The project focussed
on developing a mapping from this symbolic description of prosody to the
corresponding phonetic/acoustic parameter values (fundamental frequency,
duration, intensity). An algorithm for realizing this mapping was
developed and implemented. The description arrived at forms the input
for a parametrizable synthesizer. The synthesizer used in the project
is based on an adaptation of a demi-syllable synthesizer developed at the
Institute für Nachrichtentechnik und Hochfrequenztechnik at the Vienna
University of Technology.
