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DEGREE REGULATIONS & PROGRAMMES OF STUDY 2022/2023

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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 Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) AvailabilityAvailable to all students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
Summary This course explores issues in text-to-speech synthesis by taking a detailed look at the theory and practice of state of the art speech synthesis systems. Through lectures students will learn the theory of speech synthesis. In the lab sessions and coursework students will learn about the practical application of this theory as they design, build, and evaluate their own synthetic voice. The syllabus starts from unit selection approaches then builds up to the current state of the art using neural networks. Other topics covered include: creating the data required for unit selection or for training a neural network, speech signal processing, and evaluating speech synthesis.
Course description The course is delivered as a combination of lectures, flipped classrooms, an online forum, short videos, readings, and a practical exercise in the lab.

In the lab, students build their own fully-functional speech synthesis voice, within the Festival framework.

Syllabus: approaches to speech synthesis, text selection and recording data for corpus based approaches, searching inventories for unit selection approaches, prosody, pitch tracking and pitch marking, speech coding and vocoding for speech synthesis, statistical parametric speech synthesis using Hidden Markov models, statistical parametric speech synthesis using Deep Neural Networks, evaluating speech synthesis.
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 completed at least 3 Linguistics/Language Sciences courses at grade B or above . We will only consider University/College level courses.
High Demand Course? Yes
Course Delivery Information
Academic year 2022/23, 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 0 %, Coursework 100 %, Practical Exam 0 %
Additional Information (Assessment) Two written assignments worth 50% each
Feedback Not entered
No Exam Information
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. Understand the speech synthesis process, and be familiar with the processing steps required to convert text to speech.
  2. Be familiar with the two main speech synthesis methods currently in use, understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each.
  3. 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.
  4. Understand the design issues associated with recording data suitable for building a unit selection voice.
  5. Have practical experience of building a synthetic voice.
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 secretaryMr Liam Hedley
Tel: (0131 6)50 9870
Email: liam.hedley@ed.ac.uk
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