Vocaine the vocoder and applications in speech synthesis
Yannis Agiomyrgiannakis · 2015
Vocoders received renewed attention recently as basic components in speech synthesis applications such as voice transformation, voice conversion and statistical parametric speech synthesis. This paper presents a new vocoder synthesizer, referred to as Vocaine, that features a novel Amplitude Modulated-Frequency Modulated (AM-FM) speech model, a new way to synthesize non-stationary sinusoids using quadratic phase splines and a super fast cosine generator. Extensive evaluations are made against several state-of-the-art methods in Copy-Synthesis and Text-To-Speech synthesis experiments. Vocaine matches or outperforms STRAIGHT in Copy-Synthesis experiments and outperforms our baseline real-time optimized Mixed-Excitation vocoder with the same computational cost. We report that Vocaine considerably improves our statistical TTS synthesizers and that our new statistical parametric synthesizer [1] matched the quality of our mature production Unit-Selection system with uncompressed waveforms.