Glottal sensing for speech analysis and synthesis

Two channel speech analysis, using the electroglottograph (EGG) and the utterance, is used to parse the utterance into voiced, unvoiced, and silence regions and determine the pitch contour all in real time. Results for two algorithms which use the speech signal alone are compared to our two channel method. The effect a source-tract interaction model, based on our data, has on the production of natural sounding speech is reported. Three glottal source models are compared, namely, Fant\´s, Guerin\´s, and the impulse models. The waveforms generated by these models excite a serial/parallel Klatt formant synthesizer to produce synthesized sentences. The major parameters for producing excellent quality synthesized speech are 1) the "shape" of the glottal excitation waveform, 2) the first formant bandwidth, and 3) the locations of the higher (fourth and fifth) formant frequencies.