THE UNIVERSITY of EDINBURGH

DEGREE REGULATIONS & PROGRAMMES OF STUDY 2018/2019

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DRPS : Course Catalogue : School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences : Language Sciences

Undergraduate Course: Speech Synthesis (LASC10062)

Course Outline
SchoolSchool of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences CollegeCollege of Humanities and Social Science
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) AvailabilityAvailable to all students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
SummaryThis course explores issues in text-to-speech synthesis by taking a detailed look at the theory and practice of the state of the art speech synthesis systems. Through lectures students will learn the theory of speech synthesis through the lab sessions and assessment students will learn about the practical application of this theory as they design and build their own synthetic voice for a unit selection speech synthesiser.
Course description The syllabus include topics such as: approaches to speech synthesis, text selection and recording data for corpus based approaches, searching inventories for unit selection approaches, prosody, pitch tracking, The Festival speech synthesis system architecture, speech coding for speech synthesis, parameter driven speech synthesis, evaluating speech synthesis and building a unit selection voice.
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Students MUST have passed: Speech Processing (Hons) (LASC10061)
Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements None
Additional Costs None
Information for Visiting Students
Pre-requisitesVisiting students should have at least 3 Linguistics/Language Sciences courses at grade B or above (or be predicted to obtain this). We will only consider University/College level courses.
High Demand Course? Yes
Course Delivery Information
Academic year 2018/19, Available to all students (SV1) Quota:  None
Course Start Semester 2
Timetable Timetable
Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) Total Hours: 200 ( Lecture Hours 18, Supervised Practical/Workshop/Studio Hours 9, Summative Assessment Hours 2, Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4, Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours 167 )
Assessment (Further Info) Written Exam 50 %, Coursework 50 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment) Exam (50%). One written assignment based on laboratory work (50%)
Feedback Not entered
Exam Information
Exam Diet Paper Name Hours & Minutes
Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May)Speech Synthesis2:00
Learning Outcomes
A student who has attended this course should

Understand the speech synthesis process, and be familiar with the processing steps required to convert text to speech.

Be familiar with the two main speech synthesis methods currently in use, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Have a detailed understanding of the principles of unit selection speech synthesis, and the issues involved in choosing suitable candidate units to match a given target sequence.

Understand the design issues associated with recording data suitable for building a unit selection voice.

Have practical experience of building a synthetic voice.

Be familiar with the different speech coding techniques that can be used for speech synthesis, and understand how these can be used to aid the joining of individual speech segments and how using different signal processing techniques to manipulate speech synthesis output affects the speech quality.

Be in a position to discuss current issues in speech synthesis and be able to read current research papers.
Reading List
None
Additional Information
Graduate Attributes and Skills Not entered
KeywordsNot entered
Contacts
Course organiserProf Simon King
Tel: (0131 6)51 1725
Email: Simon.King@ed.ac.uk
Course secretaryMs Lynne Robertson
Tel: (0131 6)50 9870
Email: Lynne.Robertson@ed.ac.uk
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