Pitch control in diphone synthesis.
H. Timothy Bunnell, Debra M. Yarrington, Kenneth E. Barner · 1994
A hybrid time domain and LPC approach to speech pitch control is developed. This approach uses a low order LPC analysis and residual excitation to alter pitch period length during voiced speech. This approach differs from standard residual excited LPC in that LP reconstruction is applied only during voiced segments. Listening tests were used to compare PSOLA and the hybrid method under conditions of increasing or decreasing F0 in natural speech tokens. The natural speech was recorded by two talkers, a female adult and female child. Results suggest that, while the overall performance of the two methods is similar, the methods differ in their effectiveness with direction of F0 shift and over talkers. Keywords--- Speech, diphone synthesis, pitch modification. I. Introduction Control of intonation and timing is difficult in diphone concatenation synthesis, especially when one aim of the synthesis is to capture and present the voice characteristics of a specific talker. One method for c...