Formant Speech Synthesis

Abstract

This paper describes analysis and synthesis methods for a digital formant synthesizer. It is shown that synthetic speech generated using excitation pulses which resemble the true glottal volume-velocity excitation waveform is preferred over speech synthesized using a two-pole glottal filter and impulse excitation. Listeners also ranked speech tokens where the excitation source incorporated the effects of source-tract interaction higher in naturalness relative to token where the interaction was absent.A series of algorithms for voiced/unvoiced/mixed/silent interval classification, pitch detection, and formant estimation and tracking are described. These algorithms utilize two channels of input data, viz, the speech and the electro lotto graphic signals, and thereby achieve superior performance in comparison to single channel speech only algorithms.We have also initiated an investigation into the feasibility of using the digital formant synthesizer to study the acoustic correlates of voice quality. A number...