Method for forming the excitation signal for a glottal pulse model based parametric speech synthesis system

A method to form parametric models, comprising the steps of:

• a. computing a glottal pulse distance metric between a number of glottal pulses;
• b. clustering the glottal pulse database into a number of clusters to determine centroid glottal pulses;
• c. forming a corresponding vector database by associating a vector with each glottal pulse in the glottal pulse database, wherein the centroid glottal pulses and the distance metric is defined mathematically to determine association;
• d. determining Eigenvectors of the vector database;
• and
• e. forming parametric models by associating a glottal pulse from the glottal pulse database to each determined Eigenvector.

A method to synthesize speech using input text, comprising the steps of:

• a. converting the input text into context dependent phone labels;
• b. processing the phone labels created in step (a) using trained parametric models to predict fundamental frequency values, duration of the speech synthesized, and spectral features of the phone labels;
• c. creating an excitation signal using an Eigen glottal pulse and said predicted one or more of:
• fundamental frequency values, spectral features of phone labels, and duration of the speech synthesized;
• and
• d. combining the excitation signal with the spectral features of the phone labels using a filter to create synthetic speech output.