### 22.2 MBROLA ¶

As an example of how Festival may use a completely external synthesis method we support the free system MBROLA. MBROLA is both a diphone synthesis technique and an actual system that constructs waveforms from segment, duration and F0 target information. For details see the MBROLA home page at http://tcts.fpms.ac.be/synthesis/mbrola.html. MBROLA already supports a number of diphone sets including French, Spanish, German and Romanian.

Festival support for MBROLA is in the file `lib/mbrola.scm`. It is all in Scheme. The function `MBROLA_Synth` is called when parameter `Synth_Method` is `MBROLA`. The function simply saves the segment, duration and target information from the utterance, calls the external `mbrola` program with the selected diphone database, and reloads the generated waveform back into the utterance.

An MBROLA-ized version of the Roger diphoneset is available from the MBROLA site. The simple Festival end is distributed as part of the system in `festvox_en1.tar.gz`. The following variables are used by the process

`mbrola_progname`

  the pathname of the mbrola executable.

`mbrola_database`

  the name of the database to use. This variable is switched between different speakers.