Exploring emotional prototypes in a high dimensional TTS latent space

Understand

Recent TTS systems are able to generate prosodically varied and realistic speech.

• However, it is unclear how this prosodic variation contributes to the perception of speakers' emotional states.
• Here we use the recent psychological paradigm 'Gibbs Sampling with People' to search the prosodic latent space in a trained GST Tacotron model to explore prototypes of emotional prosody.
• Participants are recruited online and collectively manipulate the latent space of the generative speech model in a sequentially adaptive way so that the stimulus presented to one group of participants is determined by the response of the previous groups.