Undergraduate Course: Speech Synthesis (LASC10062)
Course Outline
| School | School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| 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.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
Students MUST have passed:
Speech Processing (Hons) (LASC10061)
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting 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
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| Academic year 2024/25, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 16 |
| 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 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
50 %,
Coursework
50 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
Lab report worth 50%
Centrally-arranged exam worth 50% (2 hours) |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| Exam Information |
| Exam Diet |
Paper Name |
Hours & Minutes |
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| Main Exam Diet S2 (April/May) | Speech Synthesis | 2:120 | |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- 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.
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
The course materials require students to read and evaluate research papers with a critical eye. Classes are interactive and involve a little in-class group work such as discussion papers, or elements of the practical assignment. In that practical assignment, students record speech in a professional recording studio and use it to build a synthetic voice. Good time and workload management are required to balance the various competing elements of the assignment. The instructions are deliberately somewhat under-specified, to encourage students to develop their own independent preparation, planning, organisation, and execution skills. The assignment is written up in the style of a journal paper.
Core skills gained or developed on this course:
Critical thinking; Critical analysis and evaluation; Data collection; Data analysis and evaluation; Enhanced programming / coding skills; Independence; Preparation, planning and organisation; Problem solving; Academic reading skills; Report writing; Research skills; Resilience; Time management; Workload management; Written communication; Writing clearly and concisely; Group work (delegation, influencing, conflict resolution, motivating others, taking responsibility)Critical reading of recent research publications, Scientific writing, following a journal style guide, Designing and implementing an original algorithm, Using a professional recording studio, Experimental design, including the use of human subjects for perceptual testing. |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Prof Simon King
Tel: (0131 6)51 1725
Email: Simon.King@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Ms Susan Hermiston
Tel: (0131 6)50 3440
Email: Susan.Hermiston@ed.ac.uk |
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