Tracheoesophageal Speech Repair

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Arantza Del Pozo, CUED Machine Intelligence Laboratory
• Monday 20 November 2006, 13:00-14:00
• LR6, Engineering Department, Baker Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Marcus Tomalin.

Tracheoesophageal (TE) speech is the most frequently used voice restoration technique after total laryngectomy. Despite being often cited as the alaryngeal speech alternative most comparable to normal, its quality and intelligibility are still significantly lower than laryngeal speech. Excitation and prosodic deviations are thought to be the main limitations responsible for its quality reduction. This seminar will describe excitation and duration repair systems developed for the enhancement of continuous TE speech. The excitation repair system resynthesises TE speech using a synthetic glottal waveform, reduces its jitter and shimmer and applies a novel spectral smoothing and tilt correction algorithm. For duration repair, TE phone durations are modified based on the predictions of regression trees built from non-pathological data. The perceptual enhancement of each system is evaluated using listening tests. Results show that the repaired sentences are preferred to the original overall in terms of breathiness, harshness and rhythmic naturalness.

This talk is part of the Machine Intelligence Laboratory Speech Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• CUED Speech Group Seminars
• Cambridge Forum of Science and Humanities
• Cambridge Language Sciences
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Guy Emerson's list
• Information Engineering Division seminar list
• LR6, Engineering Department, Baker Building
• Machine Intelligence Laboratory Speech Seminars
• PhD related
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.