Susan Hertz - Adjunct Professor
Ph.D., Cornell (1979)
srh9@cornell.edu [vivo]
Research
The overarching question underlying most of my research is what role universal principles of human speech perception play in the organization of speech/sound patterns in language. I am currently developing a theory of how listeners extract phonological structure and other information, such as speaker identity, from the continuous speech signal. I am testing various hypotheses related to this theory through perceptual experiments involving utterances that contain mixes of natural and synthetic speech segments. More information about my research as well as its applications to speech synthesis and other areas of speech processing can be found at www.novaspeech.com.
Teaching
Every other year, I teach Linguistics 648, a hands-on, graduate-level course in speech synthesis. Occasionally, I also teach Linguistics 419, an upper-level introduction to phonetics.
Selected Publications
- A model of the regularities underlying speaker variation: Evidence from hybrid synthesis, in Proc. Interspeech 2006i.
- When can segments serve as surrogates?, (with R. Goldhor) in From Sound to Sense: 50+ Years of Discovery in Speech Communications, MIT, Cambridge, 2004.
- Perceptual consequences of nasal surrogates in English: Implications for speech synthesis, (with I. C. Spencer, T. F. Church, and R. Goldhor) in Proc. 147th Acoust. Soc. Amer., 2004.
- Integration of rule-based formant synthesis and waveform concatenation: a hybrid approach to text-to-speech synthesis, in Proceedings IEEE 2002 Workshop on Speech Synthesis, 2002.
- Language-universal and language-specific components in the multi-language ETI-Eloquence text-to-speech system, (with R. J. Younes and N. Zinovieva) in Proc. 14th ICPhS 2283-2286, 1999.
- An integrated approach to phonology and phonetics, (with G. N. Clements) in Current Trends in Phonology: Models and Methods, CRNS, Paris X and Univ. of Salford Pub., 1996.
- A nucleus-based timing model applied to multi-dialect speech synthesis by rule, (with M. K. Huffman) in Proc. International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 2, 1171-1174, 1992.
- Streams, phones, and transitions: toward a phonological and phonetic model of formant timing, in J. of Phonetics 19, 91-109, Special Issue on SPeech Synthesis and Phonetics, R. Carlson (ed.), 1991.