Expression in Speech Analysis and Synthesis [Hardcover]

All human speech has expression. It is part of the 'humanness' of speech, and is a quality listeners expect to find. Without expression, speech sounds lifeless and artificial. Remove expression, and what's left is the bare bones of the intended message, but none of the feelings which surround the message. The purpose of this book is to present research examining expressive content in speech with a view to simulating expression in computer speech. Human beings communicate expressively with each other in conversation: now in the computer age there is a perceived need for machines to communicate expressively with humans in dialogue.

Introduction
1 Expression in Speech
1. Natural Speech
2. Speech Synthesis
3. Expression in Natural Speech
4. Expression in Synthetic Speech
5. The Perception of Expression
2 Transferring Natural Expression to Synthesis
6. The State of the Art
7. Emotion in Speech Synthesis
8. Recent Developments in Synthesis Models
3 Expression and Emotion: The Research
9. The Biology and Psychology Perspectives
10. The Linguistics, Phonology, and Phonetics Perspective
11. The Speech Technology Perspective
12. The Influence of Emotion Studies
4 Development of an Integrated Model of Expression
13. The Beginnings of a Generalized Model of Expression
14. All Speech is Expression Based
15. Expressive Synthesis - The Longer Term
16. An Expression and Prosody Based Model of Speech Production
Conclusion
References

Extremely useful as a guide to anyone working on the interface between emotion in speech and speech synthesis. Tatham and Morton offer a far-sighted perspective to this topic and make explicit many issues the developer of synthesis systems might not think about at all. In this sense the book is also a very good example of how the linguist and phonetician can make valuable contributions to speech technology, lc