On the Use of Phonetic Information for Mapping from Articulatory Movements to Vocal Tract Spectrum

This paper describes a method for determining the vocal tract spectrum from articulatory movements using an hidden Markov models (HMMs). In the proposed system, articulatory parameters are generated from a TTS system and converted to acoustic features to be synthesized. Comparing with conventional GMM-based systems, the proposed system has two additional properties: 1) phonetic information given input texts is available for the conversion, 2) the use of HMMs allows us to utilize the temporal structure of speech. In this paper, we investigate the optimal structure of HMMs for the conversion. Experimental results show that using phonetic and temporal information can improve the mapping accuracy in a spectral distortion measure
ICASSP2006: IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, May 14-19, 2006, Toulouse, France.