I am currently a Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher (PhD student) at the University of Edinburgh - Centre for Speech Technology Research. My PhD is funded by the Innovative Training Network Grant called Conversational Brains and you can find a link to my Early Stage Researcher profile here. In my research, I focus on aspects of conversational context that have an influence on the prosodic output of an utterance in natural conversational speech. The main goal is to use speech synthesis as a tool to explore how context affects prosody, and at the same time we want to leverage new contextual features in our TTS models to improve conversational TTS output. I am supervised by Simon King and Catherine Lai.

News

• August 2023: Two co-authored papers were accepted to the Speech Synthesis Workshop in Grenoble.
• June 2023: Two co-authored papers were accepted to Interspeech 2023 in Dublin.
• May 2023: Happy to announce that we will be presenting two papers at ICPhS in Prague in August.
• May 2023: In Spring 2023 I will be doing a three month placement at ReadSpeaker with Esther Klabbers.
• April 2023: We are hosting a scientific outreach programme for children at the National Museum of Scotland called “What’s in a voice?” link
• January 2023: Excited to be one of the co-organisers of the Young Female Researchers in Speech Workshop at Interspeech this year.
• November 2023: I gave a talk at the ADAPT centre at Trinity College Dublin on the need for more research into context effects in speech.
• September 2023: I presented my paper on using found data to improve conversational prosody at Interspeech in Incheon in September.
• April 2022: From April-September 2022 I will be a visiting PhD student at the University of Helsinki.

Papers

• IS samples samples
• Prosody control samples
• Adriana Stan, Johannah O’Mahony (2023) “An analysis on the effects of speaker embedding choice in non auto-regressive TTS” SSW 2023
• Johannah O’Mahony, Catherine Lai, Simon King “Synthesising turn-taking cues using natural conversational data” (2023) SSW 2023 samples
• Niamh Corkey, Johannah O’Mahony, Simon King “Intonation Control for Neural Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Polynomial Models of F0” (2023) Interspeech, Dublin Ireland
• Mikey Elmers, Johannah O’Mahony, Éva Szekely (2023) “Synthesis after a couple PINTs: Investigating the Role of Pause-Internal Phonetic Particles in Speech Synthesis and Perception” Interspeech, Dublin Ireland
• Joanna Kruyt, Lena-Marie Huttner, Johannah O’Mahony (2023) “Investigating the relationship between prosodic entrainment and interaction style” International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023 Prague) (equal contribution paper)
• Sofoklis Kakouros, Johannah O’Mahony (2023) “What does BERT learn about prosody?” International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2023 Prague)
• Johannah O’Mahony, Catherine Lai, Simon King (2022) “Combining conversational speech with read speech to improve prosody in Text-to-Speech synthesis” Interspeech samples
• Pilar Oplustil-Gallegos, Johannah O’Mahony, Simon King (2021) “Comparing acoustic and textual representations of previous linguistic context for improving Text-to-Speech” Speech Synthesis Workshop SSW11 paper
• Johannah O’Mahony, Pilar Oplustil-Gallegos, Catherine Lai, Simon King (2021) “Factors Affecting the Evaluation of Synthetic Speech in Context” Speech Synthesis Workshop SSW11 - link to stimuli paper
• Marc Schulder, Johannah O’Mahony, Yury Bakanouski, Dietrich Klakow (2020) “ATC-ANNO: Semantic Annotation for Air Traffic Control with Assistive Auto-Annotation” (LREC2020) paper
• Johannah O’Mahony, Bernd Möbius (2019): “An investigation into exemplar effects in the perceptual learning paradigm”. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019) (Melbourne), 2524-2528. paper
• Iona Gessinger, Eran Raveh, Johannah O’Mahony, Ingmar Steiner, Bernd Möbius (2016): “A shadowing experiment with natural and synthetic stimuli”. 12. Tagung Phonetik und Phonologie im deutschsprachigen Raum (P&P 12, München), 58-61 paper