Speech generation through waveform synthesis

This paper presents a time domain technique for the generation of speech which offers significant advantages over current formant synthesis and linear predictive coder (LPC) techniques. A set of basis functions in conjunction with a time-compression (and expansion) operation is shown to span the parameter space of the vocal tract model. The relationship between these basis functions and the formant synthesis parameters is derived and graphically illustrated. The ´waveform synthesis´ technique is particularly well suited for microprocessor implementation and as shown in the paper two D-A converters in conjunction with a standard microprocessor and associated ROM, RAM and I/O can be used to implement this technique.