An articulatory speech synthesizer based on a frequency-domain simulation of the vocal tract

An articulation-based speech synthesis system is briefly described. The system first carries out a frequency-domain analysis of the vocal tract and then derives the counterpart in the time domain in terms of partial fraction expansion of the transfer function. The advantages of the approach are that the vocal-tract acoustics simulation is accurate and effective and that the synthesis computation is efficient. Furthermore, the system presents a conceptual compatibility with conventional formants synthesizers. The emphasis is on two detailed aspects of the synthesizer: the parametrization of the vocal tract in the area-function domain and optimal formant connection, to maximally preserve resonance continuity, when two contiguous segments have different numbers of formants