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In mechanical speech synthesis from the 18th up to the 20th century, reed pipes were mainly used for the generation of the voice and the organ stop vox humana was central in this process. This has been described in different historical documents which report that the vox humana in some organs sounded like human vowels. In this study, tones of four different voces humanae were recorded to investigate their similarity to human vowels. The acoustical and perceptual analysis revealed that some, though not all, tones show a high similarity to selected vowels.
Scientific interest in von Kempelen's 'speaking machine' stems mainly from a general interest in the history of science. This study, however, is devoted to the question of what relevance the 'speaking machine' has today. Apart for discussing why it fascinates researchers and non-researchers alike we describe the construction of a replica and its potential as an instrument for demonstration and for researching speech generation.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in the perceptual quality of a text-to-speech system. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of a symbolic representation which was either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic representation is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, post-lexical segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to derive an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.