Generating emotional speech with a concatenative synthesizer

Abstract

We describe the attempt to synthesize emotional speech with a concatenative speech synthesizer using a parameter space cover-ing not only f0, duration and amplitude, but also voice quality parameters, spectral energy distribution, harmonics-to-noise ratio, and articulatory precision. The application of these extended parameter set offers the possibility to combine the high segmental quality of concatenative synthesis with a wider range of control settings needed for the synthesis of natural affected speech.