Objective

The aim of this project is to conduct basic research on the audio-visual speech synthesis of Austrian dialects. The project extends our previous work on

Method

10 speakers (5 male and 5 female) will be recorded for each dialect. The recordings comprise spontaneous speech, read speech and naming tasks, eliciting substantial phonemic distinctions and phonotactics. Consequently, a detailed acoustic-phonetic and phonological analysis will be performed for each dialect. Based on the acoustic-phonetic and phonological data analysis, 600 phonetically balanced sentences will be created and recorded with 4 speakers (2 male, 2 female) for each dialect. In these recordings the acoustic and the visual signal, resulting from the same speech production process, will be recorded jointly to account for the multimodal nature of human speech. The recorded material will serve as a basis for the development, training, and testing of speech synthesizers at the Telecommunications Research Center.

Funding

FWF (Wissenschaftsfonds): 2011-2013

Project Manager: Michael Pucher, Telecommunications Research Center, Vienna

Project Partner: Sylvia Moosmüller, Acoustics Research Institute, Austria Academy of Sciences, Vienna