EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Estimation of Resonant Characteristics Based on AR-HMM Modeling and Spectral Envelope Conversion of Vowel Sounds

Nobuyuki Nishizawa, Keikichi Hirose, Nobuaki Minematsu

University of Tokyo, Japan

A new method was developed for accurately separating source and articulation filter characteristics of speech. This method is based on the AR-HMM modeling, where the residual waveform is expressed as the output sequence from an HMM. To realize an accurate analysis, a scheme of dividing HMM state was newly introduced. Using the AR-filter parameter values obtained through the analysis, we can construct a vocoder-type formant synthesizer, where the residual waveform is used as the excitation source. Through the listening test on the vowel sounds synthesized using AR-filter from a vowel and excitation waveform from another vowel, it was shown that a "flexible" synthesis with a high controllability on the acoustic parameters were possible by our formant synthesis configuration.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Nishizawa, Nobuyuki / Hirose, Keikichi / Minematsu, Nobuaki (2003): "Estimation of resonant characteristics based on AR-HMM modeling and spectral envelope conversion of vowel sounds", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 885-888.