Ken Stevens’ influence on the development of paradigms for speech synthesis

Abstract

Synthetic speech has long been used as a means of understanding both speech production and speech perception, as well as for technological applications such as text-to-speech devices. Paradigms for developing speech synthesis systems have included electrical circuits, digital filters, and computational models that replicate either the structure or acoustic characteristics of the voice source and vocal tract. This presentation will focus on how Ken Stevens’ investigations of speech, spanning more than five decades, have directly influenced essentially every paradigm of speech synthesis, including formant synthesis, articulatory synthesis, and speech production modeling. [Work supported by NIH R01-DC011275 and NSF BCS-1145011.]