A comparative evaluation of vocoding techniques for HMM-based laughter synthesis

This paper presents an experimental comparison of various leading vocoders for the application of HMM-based laughter synthesis. Four vocoders, commonly used in HMM-based speech synthesis, are used in copy-synthesis and HMM-based synthesis of both male and female laughter. Subjective evaluations are conducted to assess the performance of the vocoders. The results show that all vocoders perform relatively well in copy-synthesis. In HMM-based laughter synthesis using original phonetic transcriptions, all synthesized laughter voices were significantly lower in quality than copy-synthesis, indicating a challenging task and room for improvements. Interestingly, two vocoders using rather simple and robust excitation modeling performed the best, indicating that robustness in speech parameter extraction and simple parameter representation in statistical modeling are key factors in successful laughter synthesis.