Voice source for synthetic speech system
First Claim
Patent Images
1. In a synthetic voice generating system, the improvement therein comprising:
- a plurality of glottal pulses, each glottal pulse having a different desired frequency and being a selected portion of a speech waveform, said speech waveform being created by measuring sound pressures of a human spoken sound at successive sample points in time and inverse-filtering the measurements to remove vocal tract components;
storage means for storing said plurality of glottal pulses; and
means for utilizing said plurality of glottal pulses to generate a synthetic voice signal.
0 Assignments
0 Petitions
Accused Products
Abstract
The voice source for the synthetic speech system is human generated speech waveforms that are inverse filtered to produce glottal waveforms representing larynx sound. These glottal waveforms are modified in pitch and amplitude, as required, to produce the desired sound. The human quality of the synthetically generated voice is further brought out by adding vocal tract effects, as desired. The pitch control is effected in one of two alternate ways, a loop method, or a concatenation method.
-
Citations
47 Claims
-
1. In a synthetic voice generating system, the improvement therein comprising:
-
a plurality of glottal pulses, each glottal pulse having a different desired frequency and being a selected portion of a speech waveform, said speech waveform being created by measuring sound pressures of a human spoken sound at successive sample points in time and inverse-filtering the measurements to remove vocal tract components; storage means for storing said plurality of glottal pulses; and means for utilizing said plurality of glottal pulses to generate a synthetic voice signal. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
-
-
8. In a synthetic voice generating system, the improvement therein comprising:
-
a plurality of glottal pulses stored in a storage means, each glottal pulse having a desired frequency and being a selected portion of a speech waveform, said speech waveform being created by measuring sound pressures of a human spoken sound at successive sample points in time and inverse-filtering the measurements to remove vocal tract components; a voice source means for generating a signal representing the sound produced by a human larynx by combining a plurality of said stored glottal pulses; and a vocal tract simulating means for modifying the signals from said voice source means to simulate the effect of a human vocal tract on said voice source signals. - View Dependent Claims (9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36)
-
-
37. In a synthetic voice generating system, the improvement therein comprising:
-
a plurality of glottal pulses said glottal pulses having different desired frequencies and being a selected portion of an inverse-filtered human speech waveform; storage means for storing said glottal pulses; means for retrieving said glottal pulses from said storage means; and means for applying said glottal pulses to a synthesis filter to generate a synthetic voice signal. - View Dependent Claims (38, 39)
-
-
40. In a synthetic voice generating system, the improvement comprising:
-
a plurality of stored glottal pulses, each stored glottal pulse having a desired frequency and being a selected portion of a speech waveform, said speech waveform created by measuring sound pressures of a human spoken sound at successive sample points in time and inverse-filtering the measurements to remove vocal tract components; a noise source means for generating a signal representing the sound produced by a human larynx by combining a plurality of said stored glottal pulses; and a vocal tract simulating means for modifying the signals from said noise source means to simulate the effect of a human vocal tract on said noise source signals. - View Dependent Claims (41, 42)
-
-
43. In a synthetic voice generating system, the improvement therein comprising:
-
a plurality of glottal pulses in a storage means, said pulses comprising portions of glottal waveforms generated by inverse filtering time-domain representations of human speech with a plurality of second-order, finite-impulse-response filters with zeros chosen to cancel human vocal tract resonance components therefrom, each of said plurality of glottal pulses having a desired frequency and including frequency domain and time domain characteristics of human speech; pitch control means for receiving said plurality of glottal pulses and generating pitch-modified glottal pulses; amplitude control means for receiving said pitch-modified glottal pulses and increasing or decreasing an amplitude of said pitch-modified glottal pulses to generate amplitude-modified glottal pulses; and vocal tract simulating means for modifying said amplitude-modified glottal pulses received from said amplitude control means to simulate human vocal tract resonances on said amplitude-modified glottal pulses.
-
-
44. A method of generating speech comprising the steps of:
-
extracting glottal pulses from speech, each glottal pulse having a different frequency; storing said glottal pulses in a memory; reading said glottal pulses from said memory; and applying the glottal pulses read from memory to a synthesis filter for outputting speech. - View Dependent Claims (45)
-
-
46. A method of generating synthetic speech having various pitches from inverse-filtered speech waveforms, comprising the following steps:
-
reading a first glottal pulse from a memory containing a plurality of glottal pulses, each stored glottal pulse having a different period, said first glottal pulse having a first period that corresponds to a first desired pitch; reading a second glottal pulse from said memory, said second glottal pulse having a second period that corresponds to a second desired pitch; concatenating the two glottal pulses to form a resulting waveform; and applying the resulting waveform to a synthesis filter to generate speech with varying pitch. - View Dependent Claims (47)
-
Specification