We propose a new practical input interface for the recognition of Non-Audible Murmur (NAM), which is defined as articulated respiratory sound without vocal-fold vibration transmitted through the soft tissues of the head. We developed a microphone attachment, which adheres to the skin, by applying the principle of a medical stethoscope, found the ideal position for sampling flesh-conducted NAM sound vibration and retrained an acoustic model with NAM samples. Then using the Julius Japanese Dictation Toolkit, we tested the feasibility of using this method in place of an external microphone for analyzing air-conducted voice sound.

This paper describes the special demands of conversational speech in the context of corpus-based speech synthesis. The author proposed the CHATR system of prosody-based unit-selection for concatenative waveform synthesis seven years ago, and now extends this work to incorporate the results of an analysis of five-years of recordings of spontaneous conversational speeech in a wide range of actual daily-life situations. The paper proposes that the expresion of affect (often translated as 'kansei' in Japanese) is the main factor differentiating laboratory speech from real-world conversational speech, and presents a framework for the specification of affect through differences in speaking style and voice quality. Having an enormous corpus of speech samples available for concatenation allows the selection of complete phrase-sized utterance segments, and changes the focus of unit selection from segmental or phonetic continuity to one of prosodic and discoursal appropriateness instead. Samples of the resulting large-corpus-based synthesis can be heard at http://feast.his.atr.jp/AESOP.

With the aim of enabling concatenative synthesis of expressive speech, we herein report progress towards developing robust and automatic algorithms for paralinguistic annotation of very large recorded-speech corpora. In particular, we describe a method of combining robust acoustic-prosodic and cepstral analyses to locate centres of acoustic-phonetic reliability in the speech stream, wherein physiologically meaningful parameters related to voice quality can be estimated more reliably. We then report some evaluations of a specific voice-quality parameter known as the glottal Amplitude Quotient (AQ), which was proposed in [2],[6] and is here measured automatically at centres of reliability in continuous speech. Analyses of a large, single-speaker corpus of emotional speech first validate the perceptual importance of the AQ parameter in quantifying the mode of phonation along the pressed-modal-breathy continuum, then reveal some of its phonetic, prosodic, and paralinguistic dependencies.