Help me revise my personal statement, please?

Since I was a teenager, I have been a devoted fan of virtual idols, the personification of singing synthesizers. Unlike other users of singing synthesizers, I prefer to make virtual idols speak rather than sing by manipulating the parameters of the software in a way that imitates speech.

However, I never thought I could build a voice synthesizer until I discovered a high school student, who built one called Rocaloid by himself. Inspired by his efforts and achievements, I decided to learn to build my own speech synthesizer.

In the beginning, I learned speech processing via lecture videos on speech.zone, Dr. Simon King’s personal website. I also read related books including “Speech and Language Processing”and “Elements of Acoustic Phonetics”. These learning materials introduced me to a completely new world, the world of speech technology.

Afterwards, I went to study at Audio, Speech and Language Processing Lab at Northwestern Polytechnical University, under the supervision of Professor Lei Xie. I familiarized myself with steps of statistical parametric speech synthesis there and learned a lot of aspects of speech technology while exposed to the research environment. This experience inspired me a lot and made me decide that speech processing is what I wanted to study further on.

Currently, I intend on pursuing a PhD upon completion of my master’s, focusing on emotional speech synthesis. I think that to succeed in making a synthesizer appear alive, it is essential to generate voice with emotion.

I chose to study this MSc at Edinburgh for three reasons. Firstly, although I am highly interested in speech technology and self studied a lot, such as math and programming, I don’t have a related degree in this field. This programme could give me an opportunity for further academic research on speech processing. Besides, I also want to learn natural language processing systematically, which is essential for speech synthesis front ends.

Secondly, all of the graduates of this programme I spoke to spoke highly of it. As I heard from graduates, the programme director really care about students and are highly responsible for teaching. I have not only watched his lecture videos, but also followed his “A beginners’ guide to statistical parametric speech synthesis” to synthesize voices. I sincerely hope that I could be taught by him and write my master thesis under the supervision of him.

Thirdly, the faculty of this programme are world leading in this field and the university of Edinburgh is highly ranked in the world. I’m certain that the academic experience at Edinburgh will be the greatest asset in my life.

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I will sincerely appreciate your help!