Speech Transformation System (Spectrum and/or Excitation) without Pitch Extraction

Abstract

Abstract : A new speech analysis-synthesis system has been developed which is capable of independent manipulation of the fundamental frequency and spectral envelope of a speech waveform. The system deconvolves the original speech with the spectral-envelope estimate to obtain a model for the excitation. Hence, explicit pitch extraction is not required. As a consequence, the transformed speech is more natural sounding than would be the case if the excitation were modeled as a sequence of pulses. The system has applications in the areas of voice modification, baseband-excited vocoders, time-scale modification, and frequency compression as an aid to the partially deaf. (Author)