Subjective Evaluation of Join Cost Functions Used in Unit Selection Speech Synthesis

In our previous papers, we have proposed join cost functions derived from spectral distances, which have good correlations with perceptual scores obtained for a range of concatenation discontinuities. To further validate their ability to predict concatenation discontinuities, we have chosen the best three spectral distances and evaluated them subjectively in a listening test. The unit sequences for synthesis stimuli are obtained from a state-of-the-art unit selection text-to-speech system: rVoice from Rhetorical Systems Ltd. In this paper, we report listeners' preferences for each of the three join cost functions