-------------------------------------------------------------------- D I P H O N E S T U D I O -------------------------------------------------------------------- Version 1.3 Copyright (C) 1997-1999 Fluency/Van Dale Lexicografie BV, Utrecht/NL All rights reserved -------------------------------------------------------------------- I N T R O D U C T I O N Diphone Studio is a tool for developing and maintaining a set of diphones for use in speech synthesis. A diphone is the transition between two speech sounds, obtained from natural speech. A diphone synthesizer creates new utterances by concatenation of diphones, modifying pitch and duration of each sound according to some specification. A diphone set is created in a number of steps: 1. Specification of a phoneme inventory 2. Creation of a corpus 3. Recording the corpus 4. Segmentation of the corpus 5. Preliminary evaluation 6. Post-processing Diphone Studio is designed to facilitate steps 3 through 5. The program was specifically designed for the creation of diphone databases for the MBROLA synthesizer, developed by Thierry Dutoit and colleagues at the Faculté Polytechnique de Mons. For more information about the MBROLA synthesizer see http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html on the World Wide Web. ------------------------------------------------------------- L I C E N S E A G R E E M E N T Diphone Studio is freely available for evaluation and non- commercial use. For commercial use, the user is required to obtain a license. For more information, contact: Fluency/Van Dale Lexicografie BV info@fluency.nl www.fluency.nl ------------------------------------------------------------- I N S T A L L A T I O N A N D T E S T I N G Diphone Studio runs under Windows 95/98/NT, and requires a Windows-compatible 16-bit sound card. The program is distributed as a .ZIP file, usually called DSTUDIO.ZIP To install the program, you will need PKUNZIP.EXE (or an equivalent program, such as WINZIP): 1. Create a directory for the program and change to it 2. Unpack DSTUDIO.ZIP to this directory. Make sure subdirectories contained in the .ZIP file are restored. For example, if you use PKUNZIP, the command to unpack is: pkunzip -d dstudio To test the program: 1. From Windows, start DSTUDIO.EXE 2. From the menu, select File|Open. Next, select the subdirectory EXAMPLE, and from this directory select EXAMPLE.DAT. This loads a small diphone database. 3. The on-line help will guide you from here. ------------------------------------------------------------- Utrecht, December 1, 1999