Robust ARMA analysis for the determination of voice source and vocal tract control parameters in speech synthesis
Johan de Veth, Louis Boves, W. van Golstein Brouwers · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1989
A cascade six pole-pair and five zero-pair synthesizer has been developed as part of a text-to-speech conversion system for Dutch. Control information for this synthesizer is derived from a.o. measurements on natural speech. A pitch synchronous robust ARMA analysis technique was developed and applied to utterances produced by a number of adult male talkers. The resulting pole-zero parameters were separated into sets pertaining to the source of the vocal tract. The vocal tract parameters were corrected in those frames where the analysis method made occasional mistakes. Analysis-resynthesis of sentence material using the corrected vocal tract parameters to control the synthesizer driven by impulse and noise excitation yielded high-quality synthetic speech. The tract parameters were then used to inverse filter the speech, to obtain the source function, that was subsequently parametrized using the Liljencrants-Fant model. It is hoped that the speech quality will be improved by replacing the impulse excitation by the controllable source model.