Natural Sounding Sub-Word Units Concatenation in Malay Speech Synthesis

Abstract

The goal of this work was to concatenate Malay subwordswithout introducing perceptible audible discontinuities.Based on a phonemes adjacency analysis, we build a list ofnon-audible distortion sub-word unit lookup. Selecting subwordfrom this lookup will avoid spectral mismatched betweenthe joined speech units and this can guarantee the segmentalquality of the sub-words concatenation. In order to avoidprosodic mismatched, we only allow the sub-words to beconcatenated when they have the same prosodic features. Theexpectation by considering the correct prosodic features andthe non-audible discontinuities of sub-word units, a naturalsounding of sub-words concatenation is possible to be obtained.