Digital-formant synthesizer for speech-synthesis studies.

Recent work on speech synthesis by rule has led to the design and evaluation f a new digital formant synthesizer. The synthesizer was simulated ona digital computer at a 20-kHz sampling frequency. The improvements over previous synthesizers include: an excitation sonrce for the unvoiced compm•eut of voiced fricatives; a method for producing a voice bar for the closure p riod ofvoiced stops; and a simple desigu for the higher pole correction network that exploits the properties of ampled data systems. Spectrographic examples of synthetic speech are shmvn i order to illustrate hese improvementS. A brief discussion of some advantages and disadvantages of serial and parallel synthesizers is presented.