Glottal Pulse Shape Optimization using Simulated Annealing

Excitation signal has essential role in speech synthesis filters to produce natural speech. In this study, a new method is proposed for modeling the glottal pulse shape of a speaker. A search is done on the glottal pulse shape space using simulated annealing method. The PESQ measure and Cepstral distance between the original signal and the synthesized signal are used as the cost function. An LPC filter with 10 coefficients is used as the synthesis filter. The PESQ value between the original and synthesized speech using traditional impulse is 2.402. Here, the glottal pulse for a certain speaker is modeled in three different experiments. In the first experiment, the negative PESQ measure is used as the cost function. The PESQ value of 2.881 is achieved in this experiment. In the second experiment, the Cepstral distance is used as cost function, resulting in the PESQ value of 2.697. In the third experiment, only the vowel parts are considered in computing the distance measure, which results in the PESQ value of 2.733.