Diphone
Encyclopedia
In phonetics
, a diphone is an adjacent pair of phones. It is usually used to refer to a recording of the transition between two phones.
In the following diagram, a stream of phones are represented by P1, P2, etc., and the corresponding diphones are represented by D1-2, D2-3, etc:
|P1
), the number of diphones in each language is usually much smaller than P2.
Spanish
has about 800 diphones and German
has about 2,500.
Diphones are useful in speech synthesis
: When pre-recorded diphones are combined to create synthesized speech, the resulting sounds are much more natural than combining just simple phones, because the pronunciations of each phone varies based on the surrounding phones.
Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech, or—in the case of sign languages—the equivalent aspects of sign. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds or signs : their physiological production, acoustic properties, auditory...
, a diphone is an adjacent pair of phones. It is usually used to refer to a recording of the transition between two phones.
In the following diagram, a stream of phones are represented by P1, P2, etc., and the corresponding diphones are represented by D1-2, D2-3, etc:
|P1
|P2
|P3|P4
|P5|P6
||D1-2=|D2-3=|D3-4=|D4-5=|D5-6=|
If the number of phones in a language is P, then the theoretical number of possible diphones is P2, although since all languages have restrictions about what sounds can occur next to each other (see phonotacticsPhonotactics
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes...
), the number of diphones in each language is usually much smaller than P2.
Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
has about 800 diphones and German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
has about 2,500.
Diphones are useful in speech synthesis
Speech synthesis
Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware...
: When pre-recorded diphones are combined to create synthesized speech, the resulting sounds are much more natural than combining just simple phones, because the pronunciations of each phone varies based on the surrounding phones.