Emotion in concatenated speech

This paper describes the results of preliminary attempts to add emotion to concatenative synthetic speech (using BT´s Laureate synthesiser), initially using techniques previously applied successfully to formant synthesis. A new intonation contour (including both pitch and duration changes) was applied to the concatenated segments during production of the final audible utterance, and some of the available synthesis parameters were systematically modified to increase the affective content. The output digital speech samples were then subject to further manipulation with a waveform editing package, to produce the final output utterance. Further work has produced prototype rule-based implementations which allow automatic production of emotional utterances, and development of these systems is described. A pilot listening experiment to compare the hand-edited and automatic phrases with the formant-based synthesis has been conducted, and preliminary findings are reported