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Semester 2

Speech Synthesis (LASC10062)

Subject

Language Sciences and Linguistics

College

CAHSS

Credits

20

Normal Year Taken

3

Delivery Session Year

2023/2024

Pre-requisites

Visiting students should have completed at least 3 Linguistics/Language Sciences courses at grade B or above . We will only consider University/College level courses.

Course Summary

This course explores issues in text-to-speech synthesis by taking a detailed look at the theory and practice of state of the art speech synthesis systems. Through lectures students will learn the theory of speech synthesis. In the lab sessions and coursework students will learn about the practical application of this theory as they design, build, and evaluate their own synthetic voice. The syllabus starts from unit selection approaches then builds up to the current state of the art using neural networks. Other topics covered include: creating the data required for unit selection or for training a neural network, speech signal processing, and evaluating speech synthesis.

Course Description

The course is delivered as a combination of lectures, flipped classrooms, an online forum, short videos, readings, and a practical exercise in the lab. In the lab, students build their own fully-functional speech synthesis voice, within the Festival framework. Syllabus: approaches to speech synthesis, text selection and recording data for corpus based approaches, searching inventories for unit selection approaches, prosody, pitch tracking and pitch marking, speech coding and vocoding for speech synthesis, statistical parametric speech synthesis using Hidden Markov models, statistical parametric speech synthesis using Deep Neural Networks, evaluating speech synthesis.

Assessment Information

Written Exam 0%, Coursework 100%, Practical Exam 0%

view the timetable and further details for this course