WINDBAG—A Vocal-Tract Analog Speech Synthesizer
Brent S. Baxter, William J. Strong · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1969
This report describes the beginnings of an effort in speech synthesis at Brigham Young University. Both terminal analog and vocal tract analog synthesizers will be studied eventually, but this paper discusses only a vocal tract synthesizer. The synthesizer is patterned after one described by Flanagan and Landgraf [IEEE Trans. Audio and Electroacoust. Au-16, 57 (1968)] in which the vocal cords and vocal tract are able to interact. A delay-line scheme similar to one described by Kelly and Lochbaum [Proc. Stockholm Speech Commun. Seminar, R.I.T. Stockholm, Sept. 1962)], but terminated at the mouth end with a filter, is used to represent the vocal tract. Some modifications to Flanagan's vocal-cord model have been incorporated. Preliminary synthesis results for steady-state vowels and consonant-vowel transitions will be presented.