Hertz, S.R. and Mills, H.G. (2011). System and method for hybrid speech synthesis, United States Patent number 7953600 B2.

Patents cover certain innovations in our hybrid approach to speech synthesis, including one in which certain formant transitions within syllable nuclei are synthesized using rule-based formant synthesis and the remaining portions of the nuclei are taken from natural speech.

USPTO Link

Hertz, S.R. and Mills, H.G. (2010). System and method for hybrid speech synthesis, European Patent number EP 2140447 B1.

Hertz, S., Gibson, M., Glatthorn, N., Hegde, P., Mills, H., Spencer, I. (2008) The role of prosody in speech parsing, Poster presented at Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody, Cornell.

Abstract and poster present a model of speech parsing, accounting for how listeners derive discrete phonological structure from the continuous speech signal.

Abstract (222 KB)
Poster (2.52 MB)

Hertz, S. R. (2006) A model of the regularities underlying speaker variation: Evidence from hybrid synthesis, Proc. Interspeech 2006.

Paper and presentation present the framework of a speech model that offers an explanation of how listeners can identify phonemes in an incoming speech signal despite the vast amount of cross-speaker and contextual variation. Presentation includes hybrid speech examples.

Paper (873 KB)
Presentation (5.3 MB)

Hertz, S. R., Spencer, I. C., and Goldhor, R. (2004) When can speech segments serve as surrogates?, Poster presented at From Sound to Sense: 50+ Years of Discoveries in Speech Communication, MIT.

Poster outlines hypotheses about the phonological, acoustic, and perceptual factors that determine which segments can be replaced and which segments can serve as "surrogates" for other segments. Includes hybrid speech examples.

Poster (2.2 MB)

Hertz, S. R., Spencer, I. C., Church, T. F., and Goldhor, R. (2004) Perceptual consequences of nasal surrogates in English: Implications for speech synthesis, Poster presented at the 147th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Poster describes experiments involving syllable-initial nasal substitutions. These experiments demonstrated that even voiced sonorants like nasals can be replaced by surrogate segments with very different properties from the original nasals. Includes hybrid speech examples.

Poster (4.2 MB)