Reconstruction of continuous voiced speech from whispers
Ian Vince McLoughlin, Jingjie Li, Yan Song · 2013
Whispers are an important secondary vocal communications mechanism, that can be necessary for communicating private information and which are an integral aspect of natural human- to-human dialogue. Furthermore, they may be the primary com- munications method of those suffering from certain forms of aphonia, such as laryngectomees. This paper considers the con- version of continuous whispers to natural-sounding speech, and proposes a new reconstruction method based upon the synthesis of individual formants as excitation source, followed by artifi- cial glottal modulation. Early results show that the proposed method can improve quality and intelligibility over the original whispers when evaluated using continuous speech. It requires neither apriori nor speaker-dependent information, is of rela- tively low-complexity and suitable for real-time processing.