In
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
, a diphone is an adjacent pair of
phones
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
in an utterance. For example, in
aɪfəʊn the diphones are
a ɪ ªf É™ ™ÊŠ Šn The term 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, the theoretical number of possible diphones is P
2. However, since all languages have restrictions about what sounds can occur next to each other (see ''
phonotactics
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek "voice, sound" and "having to do with arranging") is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable struc ...
''), the number of diphones in each language is usually much smaller than P
2.
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
has about 800 diphones and
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
about 2,500.
Diphones are useful in
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 products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...
. When pre-recorded diphones are combined to create synthesized speech, the resulting sounds are much more natural than just combining simple phones. That is because the pronunciations of each phone varies based on the surrounding phones.
See also
*
Triphone In linguistics, a triphone is a sequence of three consecutive phonemes. Triphones are useful in models of natural language processing where they are used to establish the various contexts in which a phoneme can occur in a particular natural languag ...
External links
The Mbrola Project
Phonetics
Phonology
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