1. Concatenative Speech synthesis
This project aims at developing software for speech synthesis
using a existing speech segments. The student will be expected to learn the
basics of speech model, use speech data for analysis, development of the
model parameters and eventual synthesis from the model parameters. The project
is an analysis of how and what parameters to consider at the interface between
one diphone and another to make the concatenation as smooth as possible. Requirements
are subject knowledge, existing speech corpora and software tools.
This area is of high topical interest because of
the move towards direct speech machine - human interface.
2. Speech Transformation
This project takes the voice of one person, and through
the use of proper analysis and optimisation techniques, transforms this voice
into another known voice. This type of transformation is essential today where
there are corpora of synthesised speech by a person, which need to be added
to, but for which the original person who did the audio recording is no longer
available. Requirements are aptitiude for maths and for programming.