Synthesis Examples

This page contains a few synthesis examples generated by the vocal tract model implemented in VocalTractLab.
Some utterances, synthesized with an older version of the software, are the following movies:

"Guten Tag liebe Zuhörer." ("Good afternoon, dear listeners.")
"Nächster Halt: Hamburg." ("Next stop: Hamburg.")
"Der Zug hat eine Stunde Verspätung." ("The train has a delay of one hour.")

The following examples demonstrate the synthesis of fricatives using VocalTractLab. We developed a fricative noise model that predicts the postion, strength and spectral shape of monopole and dipole noise sources in the vocal tract from the properties of the area functions and flow conditions. In each of the following wav-files you will first hear a natural fricative in isolation, then the corresponding synthetic fricative in isolation and finally the synthetic fricative in a symmetric /a:/-context.

/f/ as in "fine"
/s/ as in "see"
/c/ as in the German word "ich"
/sh/ as in "shoe"
/x/ as in the German word "Achtung"

In mid 2007, VocalTractLab has been extended for the synthesis of singing. It participated in the Synthesis of Singing Challenge during the Interspeech 2007 in Antwerp, where it achived the second best place of the six participating synthesis systems. Two songs had to be prepared for this event, one song of our own choice ("Dona Nobis Pacem"), and one compulsory song ("The Synthesizer Song").

A brief description of the extensions made to the speech synthesizer for the Synthesis of Singing Challenge is here.