Articulatory synthesis of formant targeted sounds with parameters derived from the inverse solution of speech production

A new approach to produce high fidelity speech sounds by applying both the inverse solution of speech production and the pitch-synchronous articulatory synthesis technique is presented. Given a formant trace target, the dynamic vocal-tract area function together with the time variant VT length are estimated using an inverse solution of speech production. The improved Kelly-Lochbaum (1962) filter of the synthesizer, with multi-rate system sampling and dynamic scattering wave adjustment, is employed to deal with the variable VT length and acoustic continuity. The synthesizer is controlled by the estimated VT area function. A distinguished feature of this method is that artificially specified formant traces can be precisely obtained. Experimental results show that the formant targets can be precisely matched by the synthetic sounds. A potential application of this method for text-to-speech conversion is discussed.