Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban Text to Speech

From: Candide Kemmler <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 16:57:45 +0100

> I suppose that works to just cobble something together. Still,
> though, it will do nobody any good to be learning Lojban from a voice
> of this quality; we'll all sound horrible the first time we actually
> try to speak to another human. ;-) Which underscores the fact that
> it would be really nice to have a high-quality, Lojban-specific set of
> diphone recordings, which some kind folks in Brussels have recently
> volunteered to do. If you can get your diphone list to them and give
> them a hand in figuring out what to do, since you tried it once
> already, it might make things easier for them. And you have confirmed
> that you've already done all the work that I volunteered to do!

Yep, no problem, I've checked: we have everything needed to record nice 
diphones: a good mic, a Mac G4 and an excellent sound program called 
SoundForge.

So yes, please hand over the diphone list; we'll do our best. It'd be 
nice to know how to test the results as we go...

> A few notes here. First, English vowels (esp. American English) are
> very different from Lojban vowels, and for that matter from most other
> languages. English vowels are not pure vowel sounds, but slide from
> one vowel to another, as in a dipthong. Lojban vowels are pure,
> crisp, and short. Hard to communicate the distinction in text, I
> suppose.

We'd send samples regularly, but again we have to understand how to make 
the TTS system use our recordings for that.

> The Lojban 'r' is allowed to be pronounced in just about any way,
> including the standard American untrilled 'r'. I happen to think that
> Lojban sounds best with an Irish sort of 'r', but that could just be
> because I love listening to Irish accents. ;-) I would advise
> against the French "r", as that seems indistinguishable from "xr", at
> least to my ear.

Yes, I personnally cannot pronunciate "r"'s like the Italians do 
(trilled ?). And I don't know about the Irish "r". Perhaps the best 
consensus is the American "r"...

Candide