What statistical modeling tool formed the foundation of the Statistical Parametric Approach emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s?

Answer

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs).

The statistical parametric approach marked a significant shift away from physically stitching together recorded units (concatenative synthesis) or explicitly defining every linguistic rule (formant synthesis). This new method utilized statistical models to learn the underlying relationships within speech data. Specifically, researchers employed Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) to statistically model the spectral and prosodic features of speech. Human voice recordings were used to train the HMM, allowing it to learn the statistical distribution linking linguistic input (like duration, pitch, and phonemes) to the resulting acoustic output. This trained model could then generate speech by sampling from the learned distribution, offering flexibility in modifying voice characteristics without needing pre-recorded clips of those specific sounds.

What statistical modeling tool formed the foundation of the Statistical Parametric Approach emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s?

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?
inventiontechnologyvoicesynthesizerspeech synthesis