What inherent limitation often introduced audible artifacts into speech generated by Concatenative Synthesis methods?
Answer
Audible artifacts like clicks or unnatural shifts occurring at the seams where recorded snippets were joined.
Concatenative synthesis achieved a significant jump in naturalness by stitching together pre-recorded speech segments such as phonemes or diphones. However, the critical challenge lay in creating seamless transitions between these individual units. If the system was not perfectly programmed to smooth out the boundaries—the 'seams'—where one recorded snippet ended and the next began, listeners could detect distinct audible artifacts. These artifacts often manifested as small clicks, unnatural pauses, or sudden, jarring shifts in pitch or volume, detracting from the overall human-like quality the method sought to achieve.
Related Questions
How was the operation of the Voder, developed by Homer Dudley, primarily controlled when unveiled at the 1939 New York World's Fair?What acoustic principle underpinned the rule-based Formant Synthesis developed after the move to solid-state electronics in the 1960s?What inherent limitation often introduced audible artifacts into speech generated by Concatenative Synthesis methods?What process did the Vocoder, developed by Homer Dudley’s team after the Voder, perform on human speech input?Which specific deep learning architecture, developed by DeepMind, famously generated high-fidelity speech by predicting one audio sample at a time?In Concatenative Synthesis, what factor was directly dependent on the quality of the final voice output achieved by stitching segments?What statistical modeling tool formed the foundation of the Statistical Parametric Approach emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s?What crucial capability did the rudimentary acoustic devices like 'talking tubes' in the 18th and 19th centuries fundamentally lack compared to later synthesized speech?Based on the historical progression described, where did the burden of expertise shift when moving from operating the Voder to deploying modern Neural TTS systems?Which academic project originating at the University of Edinburgh was instrumental in developing toolkits like Flite and voice models such as 'C59' for concatenative synthesis research?