A Pitch-Asynchronous Simple Method for Speech Synthesis by Diphone Concatenation using the Deterministic plus Stochastic Model

One of the most common approaches to speech synthesis is the concatenation of diphones, extracted from a previously recorded database. The prosodic parameters of the recorded speech fragments have to be adapted to the specifications of the new utterances to be synthesized. In this paper, the deterministic plus stochastic model of speech is used to modify and smoothly concatenate the analyzed diphones. A very high quality is reached without pitch-synchronism, and complex calculations like the vocal tract estimation are avoided. Instead, simple linear interpolations and fast calculations are performed, and only harmonically related sinusoids are taken into account. The resynthesis of the concatenated data is carried out by the overlap-add method.