Expression in Speech: Analysis and Synthesis

This book is about the nature of expression in speech. It is a comprehensive exploration of how such expression is produced and understood, and of how the emotional content of spoken words may be analysed, modelled, tested, and synthesized. Listeners can interpret tone-of-voice, assess emotional pitch, and effortlessly detect the finest modulations of speaker attitude; yet these processes present almost intractable difficulties to the researchers seeking to identify and understand them. In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content Mark Tatham and Katherine Morton review the potential of biological and cognitive models. They examine how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists, and assess how far biological, behavioural, and linguistic models generate hypotheses that provide insights into the nature of expressive speech. The authors use recent techniques in speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition as a test bed for models of expression in speech. Acknowledging that such testing presupposes a comprehensive computational model of speech production, they put forward original proposals for its foundations and show how the relevant data structures may be modelled within its framework. This pioneering book will be of central interest to researchers in linguistics and in speech science, pathology, and technology. It will also be valuable for behavioural and cognitive scientists wanting to know more about this vital and elusive aspect of human behaviour.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1 Expression in Speech 1: Natural Speech 2: Speech Synthesis 3: Expression in Natural Speech 4: Expression in Synthetic Speech 5: The Perception of Expression 2 Transferring Natural Expression to Synthesis 6: The State of the Art 7: Emotion in Speech Synthesis 8: Recent Developments in Synthesis Models 3 Expression and Emotion: The Research 9: The Biology and Psychology Perspectives 10: The Linguistics, Phonology, and Phonetics Perspective 11: The Speech Technology Perspective 12: The Influence of Emotion Studies 4 Development of an Integrated Model of Expression 13: The Beginnings of a Generalized Model of Expression 14: All Speech is Expression Based 15: Expressive Synthesis - The Longer Term 16: An Expression and Prosody Based Model of Speech Production Conclusion References

About the Author :
Mark Tatham is Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. He researches the theory of the production and perception of speech within the general theory of linguistics. He has taught phonology, computational modelling, and speech aspects of neuro-psychology at the University of California and the University of Ohio. Katherine Morton is a Fellow in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex. She has published research in modelling speech production and perception within the overall framework of human communication, constrained by linguistic theory. She has taught experimental linguistics/phonetics at the University of Cambridge and the University of California.

Review :
`extremely useful as a guide to anyone working on the interface between emotion in speech and speech synthesis. Tatham and Morton offer a far- sighted perspective to this topic and make explicit many issues the developer of synthesis systems might not think about at all. In this sense the book is also a very good example of how the linguist and phonetician can make valuable contributions to speech technology, and that in the end the best results will be obtained if speech technologists and linguists/phoneticians work together.' Linguist List `In sum, this volume updates the reader on the relevant theories and literature, analyzes the problems of this topic, and suggests a new way of looking at the problem. It is pedagogically written, with the important points highlighted and with leading questions.' The Phonetician