A phoneme dependent voicing source for speech synthesis

Summary form only given, as follows. The quality of vowel sounds in synthetic speech produced by commercially available formant synthesizers very often lacks the desired naturalness. One reason is that most systems are implemented without including the effect of acoustic coupling of the vocal tract with the glottal and subglottal sections of the voice-production system. The authors present a method for determining the effect of this interaction on the shape of the glottal volume velocity signal, and also an algorithm which incorporates the acoustic coupling in vowel production and in vowel-vowel coarticulation in a cascaded formant synthesizer in real time.<>