An oscillator-plus-noise model for speech synthesis

Abstract

The autonomous oscillator model for speech synthesis is augmented by a non-linear predictor to re-generate the modulated noise-like signal component of speech signals. The resulting ‘oscillator-plus-noise’ model in combination with vocal tract modeling by linear prediction is able to re-generate the spectral content of stationary wide-band vowel signals with high fidelity. For adequate modeling of mixed-excitation speech signals (such as voiced fricatives), the model is extended by a second linear prediction path for the independent spectral shaping of the noise-like component. With one and the same model, not only sustained voiced and mixed-excitation phonemes, but also stationary unvoiced sounds can be re-generated faithfully.