A new model-based speech analysis/Synthesis system

Abstract

A new model-based speech analysis/synthesis system is presented in this paper. In this model, the short-time spectrum of speech is modeled as the product of an excitation spectrum and a spectral envelope. The spectral envelope is some smoothed version of the speech spectrum and the excitation spectrum is represented by the pitch period and a voiced/unvoiced (V/UV) decision for each harmonic. In speech analysis, the model parameters are estimated by explicit comparison between the original speech spectrum and the synthetic speech spectrum. Preliminary results indicate that speech and noisy speech synthesized based on this model do not have the buzziness typically associated with vocoder speech and is essentially the same as the original speech or the noisy speech in both intelligibility and quality. Potential applications of this new model and its parameter estimation include high quality speech analysis/synthesis, time scale modification of speech and noisy speech, and pitch detection.