HMM-based Speech Segmentation

ircamAlign

• ircamAlign is a tool for speech segmentation useful to create database for speech synthesis.
• it is based on the HTK toolbox and LIAPHON french phonetizer
• available for French and English
• audio speech file and its textual transcription are taken as input
• linguistic structure is extracted from the text and aligned on the audio file by considering multi-pronunciation graph to model the dependencies between phonemes.
• if the text transcription is no available, a bi-gram language model is used
• phoneme are modelized by left-right HMM with 7 states.
• Confidence measure are computed at different linguistic level for easier manual correction
• HTS lab features format are directly created to allow the quick creation of new voices.
• Automatic Phoneme Segmentation With Relaxed Textual Constraints,
  P. Lanchantin, A. C. Morris X. Rodet and C. Veaux,
  LREC'08 Proceedings, Marrakech, Marocco, 2008.

http://recherche.ircam.fr/equipes/analyse-synthese/lanchant/uploads/Main/cursus/ircamAlign6b.jpg

Musical productions using ircamAlign

• ircamAlign is used by composers and it has been used in several musical creations at IRCAM such as:
  • Com que voz, Stefano Gervasoni, Thomas Goepfer
  • HyperMusic: Prologue, Hector Parra, Thomas Goepfer
  • Häxan, la sorcellerie à travers les âges, Mauro Lanza, Olivier Pasquet
  • Cantate égale pays, Gérard Pesson, Sébastien Roux
  • Le père, Michael Jarrel, Serge Lemouton

• some examples here