pymbrola

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A Python interface for the MBROLA speech synthesizer, enabling programmatic creation of MBROLA-compatible phoneme files and automated audio synthesis. This module validates phoneme, duration, and pitch sequences, generates .pho files, and can call the MBROLA executable to synthesize speech audio from text-like inputs.

References:
Dutoit, T., Pagel, V., Pierret, N., Bataille, F., & Van der Vrecken, O. (1996, October).
The MBROLA project: Towards a set of high quality speech synthesizers free of use for non commercial purposes.
In Proceeding of Fourth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing. ICSLP'96 (Vol. 3, pp. 1393-1396). IEEE.
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSLP.1996.607874

Features

• Front-end to MBROLA: Easily create .pho files and synthesize audio with Python.
• Input validation: Prevents invalid file and phoneme sequence errors.
• Customizable: Easily set phonemes, durations, pitch contours, and leading/trailing silences.
• Cross-platform (Linux/WSL): Automatically detects and adapts to Linux or Windows Subsystem for Linux environments.

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• MBROLA binary installed and available in your system path, or via WSL for Windows users. To install MBROLA in your UBUNTU or WSL instance, run the [mbrola/install.sh] script. A Docker image of Ubuntu 22.04 with a ready-to-go installation of MBROLA is available, for convenience.
• MBROLA voices (e.g., it4) must be installed at /usr/share/mbrola/<voice>/<voice>.

Installation

MBROLA is currently available only on Linux-based systems like Ubuntu, or on Windows via the Windows Susbsystem for Linux (WSL). Install MBROLA in your machine following the instructions in the MBROLA repository. If you are using WSL, install MBROLA in WSL. After this, you should be ready to install pymbrola using pip.

pip install mbrola

Usage

Synthesize a Word

import mbrola

# Create an MBROLA object
house = mbrola.MBROLA(
    word="house",
    phon=["h", "a", "U", "s"],
    durations=100,  # or [100, 120, 100, 110]
    pitch=[200, [200, 50, 200], 200, 100]
)

# Display phoneme sequence
print(house)

# Export PHO file
house.export_pho("house.pho")

# Synthesize and save audio (WAV file)
house.make_sound("house.wav", voice="it4")

The module uses the MBROLA command line tool under the hood. Ensure MBROLA is installed and available in your system path, or WSL if on Windows.

Troubleshooting

• Ensure MBROLA and the required voices are installed and available at /usr/share/mbrola/<voice>/<voice>.
• If you encounter an error about platform support, make sure you are running on Linux or WSL.
• Write an issue, I'll look into it ASAP.

License

pymbrola is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.