SPEECH SYNTHESIS USING A PHYSIOLOGICAL ARTICULATORY MODEL WITH FEATURE-BASED RULES
A 3-D computational model of speech articulators has been developed for human-mimetic speech synthesis. The model geometry was derived from volumetric MRI data that were collected from one male speaker. A multipoint control strategy is developed to control the model, which involves three points of the articulators: the tongue tip, tongue dorsum, and the jaw. To control these points in the geometric space of the vocal tract independently, a set of weight coefficients is defined for each muscle in a specific control point. A dynamic muscle workspace is proposed to predict muscle force vectors for a control point in any arbitrary position. Muscle activation signals are generated via the dynamic workspace, and fed to the muscles to drive the model. To develop a speech synthesis system using the physiological model, this study explores some feature-based phonological rules, which provides temporally overlapping articulatory targets from a given sequence of phonetic segments. 1. RECONSTRUCTION OF SPEECH ORGANS