Synthesis by rule: LPC diphones and calculation of formant trajectories

We describe a new method for very high quality speech synthesis, and the procedure used for the automatic acquisition of the rules. Our method retains positive aspects of both diphone LPC synthesis and calculation of formant trajectories. For each sequence /VC#/ or /#CV/, we apply a very precise, pitch synchronous, LP analysis, we represent each spectrum in terms of the parameters for a parallel formant syntheziser, and we extract formant trajectories from these data. At the synthesis stage, for any /V1CcV2/ sequence, trajectories are calculated by rule using the stored trajectories of /V1Cc#/ and /#CcV2/. The signal is computed according to the calculated trajectories with a high quality parallel formant syntheziser. We have synthesized singing voices, but the same procedure can be applied to speech.