Diphone-concatenative synthesis

Klabbers, E., and Veldhuis, R. On the reduction of concatenation artefacts in diphone synthesis. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Speech and Language Processing 1998 (1998). 

Ircam s Diphone addresses one of the most challenging synthesis problems of both artificial speech and sound composition the concatenation of sound sequences. In computer-synthesised speech the algorithm used to utter a specific syllable, such as mu, may not produce satisfactory results on different words. For instance, take the words music and mutation. The computer s rendition of the syllable mu, for the word music, used at the beginning of the word mutation sounds artificial because the transition (i.e. the diphone) between u and s in the word music and the transition between u and t in the word mutation involve different spectral behaviour. This transition problem is also evident in music composition where certain articulations and musical passages are clearly more appropriate to our ears than others. This problem is even more challenging for electronic musicians because they deal with a much larger repertoire of sounds to combine and articulate. 

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