Second ESCA/IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis September 12-15, 1994 Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, NY, USA

Pitch Control in Diphone Synthesis

H. T. Bunnell, D. Yarrington, K. E. Barner

Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories, A. I. duPont Institute and The University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

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 FO 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 FO shift and over talkers.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bunnell, H. T. / Yarrington, D. / Barner, K. E. (1994): "Pitch control in diphone synthesis", In SSW2-1994, 127-130.