Development of voice montage system.

本课题的最终目标是实现一个语音蒙太奇系统，它试图用语音合成技术再现一个人的话语，让听者记住。在这笔赠款的支持下，我们探讨了实现这一目标所需的六个基本问题。（1）.与音质和说话风格相关的日常表达：通过对各种词汇源的提取，得到了1,102个表达。（2）表情的声学相关性：语音合成中尚未解决的发声年龄的声学相关性已被广泛研究，发现语速、音高轮廓和语音波形的不规则性至关重要。（三）、言语记忆跨语言知觉实验表明，对言语音质的记忆几乎与言语的语言无关。（4）声音样本的呈现策略：视听交互作用显著，提示声音和视觉呈现的结合在实现声音蒙太奇中的重要性。（5）.合成语音的相似性评估：发现话语的语音质量的相似性被保持了很长一段时间，但是话语的说话者个体性不一定被保持在记忆中。（6）、灵活的语音合成技术：对ARX分析合成方法进行了进一步的改进，特别是对GUI的改进，使用户在语音合成中具有更灵活、更容易的操作，并将上述研究成果集成到语音蒙太奇实验系统中，重点研究了话语的音质再现。对上述问题（1）的进一步阐述，特别是对与说话风格相关的表达方式的探索，是实现本项目最终目标的必要条件。

The final aim of this theme is the realization of a voice montage system, which attempts to reproduce with the speech synthesis technique an utterance of a person that a listener remembers. With the support of this grant, we have explored six fundamental problems needed to achieve the aim. The outcomes of our endeavors toward attaining the goal are described below:(1).Everyday expressions associated with voice quality and speaking style :The elaboration on the extraction from various lexical sources resulted in 1,102 expressions.(2).Acoustic correlates of the expressions :Acoustic correlates of vocal age that have remained unsolved in speech synthesis have extensively been investigated and the speaking rate, pitch contour and irregularities in the speech waveform were found to be of vital importance.(3). Memory of the utteranceCross-linguistic perceptual experiments showed that the memory of the voice quality of an utterance was almost independent of the language of the utterance.(4).Presentation strategy of voice samples :Audio-visual interaction was found to be significant, suggesting an importance of the combination of the voice and visual display in realizing the voice montage.(5).Similarity assessment of synthetic speech :Similarity of voice quality of the utterances was found to be preserved for a long period of time but speaker individuality of the utterances was not necessarily maintained in the memory.(6).Flexible speech synthesis technology :The ARX analysis-synthesis method was further improved, in particular for GUI, allowing the user to have more flexible and easy manipulation in speech synthesis.The outcomes mentioned above were integrated into an experimental system of voice montage, which primarily focuses on the reproduction of the voice quality of the utterance. Further elaboration on the problem (1) above, especially on exploring the expressions related to speaking style is necessary to attain the final goal of the project.