Conversion of neutral speech to storytelling style speech

Abstract

Speech is the most basic and widely used method for communication. There is a growing need for an expressive speech synthesis especially, when human want to communicate with robots and computers. In this paper, prosody rule-sets are designed to convert neutral to storytelling style speech for Hindi language. In order to generate a storyteller speech from a neutral speech, modification in various prosodic parameters such as pitch, intensity, duration, tempo and pauses are considered. For each of the above mentioned prosodic parameters rules are developed separately for story-specific emotions (such as sad, anger, fear, surprise and neutral). Theses rules are designed by performing analysis on stories collected from a professional storyteller. In this work, modification are done both at phrase and sentence-level. These rules are derived for both male and female speakers. Subjective tests are conducted to evaluate the quality of the generated storytelling style speech. Also, influence of speaker characteristics on neutral to story speech conversion are analysed.