A speech synthesizer for Mandarin Chinese

The design and implementation of a linear predictive coding (LPC) speech synthesizer using a general-purpose floating-point 32-bit digital signal processing (DSP) chip for Mandarin Chinese are described. The hardware synthesizer board consists of a plug-in card which can be installed in a personal computer (PC). The software consists of a hand-optimized DSP assembly program which can be downloaded from the host PC to the synthesizer RAM for real-time speech synthesis. Computer programs in Pascal have also been developed to extract the ten reflection coefficients, pitch, and gain values for the LPC synthesizer. A database of LPC parameters comprising the 56 Mandarin phonemes and the four standard pitch contours corresponding to the four lexical tones of monosyllabic Mandarin has also been created for the synthesizer.<
>