Evaluation of a glottal ARMA model of speech production

Abstract

In many speech analysis/synthesis schemes, the source for excitation for voiced speech is a train of impulses. However, the quality of speech that has been attained due to the introduction of a dynamically varying source, e.g., parametric source model, multipulse excitation has been found to be better than that using impulse excitation. The authors describe a pitch-synchronous glottal autoregressive moving average analysis/synthesis scheme in which a parametric voice source model is used in jointly estimating the source and vocal tract parameters from the speech signal. This method is then compared with closed-phase linear predictive coding (LPC), wherein covariance analysis is required to be carried out in the closed glottis interval, and with robust LPC, in which the analysis frame is insensitive to glottal closure. The superiority of the proposed scheme over the latter two methods is shown in terms of better formant/bandwidth tracking capability and efficiency of resynthesis. >