High-quality waveform generator from fundamental frequency, spectral envelope, and band aperiodicity

This paper introduces a waveform generation algorithm from three speech parameters (fundamental frequency fo, spectral envelope, and band aperiodicity). The conventional speech analysis/synthesis system based on a vocoder mainly has a waveform generator based on pitch synchronous overlap and add (PSOLA). Since it uses the fast Fourier transform (FFT) to generate the vocal cord vibration, the processing speed is proportional to the f
_o
. The algorithm also uses the spectral representation of the aperiodicity, whereas the band aperiodicity is mainly used in speech synthesis applications such as statistical parametric speech synthesis. We propose a waveform generation algorithm that reduces the computational cost and memory usage without degrading the synthesized speech. The algorithm utilizes excitation signal generation by directly using the band aperiodicity. The computational cost in a certain period is fixed because the excitation signal is filtered and processed by the overlap-add (OLA) algorithm. We used the re-synthesized speech to perform two evaluations for the processing speed and sound quality. The results showed that the sound quality of speech synthesized was almost the same by our proposed algorithm as by the conventional algorithm. The proposed algorithm can also reduce computational cost and memory usage.