Comparison of natural speech with glottal area waveform synthetic speech

We report on an investigation of the role of the vocal cord vibratory pattern in the production of natural phonation. The naturalness of synthetic phonation, generated by exciting a vocal tract model with the glottal area waveform; was evaluated and compared to the actual phonation via a formal listener evaluation. The glottal area was measured from ultra high-speed films obtained by photographing the subject´s vocal cords during phonation. The results of the formal listener evaluative session showed that the synthetic phonation was not perceived as natural. We discuss the implications of our findings with regard to the glottal area function and synthetic and real phonation for both normal and pathological cases.