14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Source Model Adequacy for Pathological Voice Synthesis

Melissa Epstein, Brian Gabelman, Norma Antoñanzas-Barroso, Bruce Gerratt, Jody Kreiman

Voice Lab, Division of Head and Neck Surgery, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Pathological voices are particularly difficult to inverse filter and fit with source models, in part, because of source-tract interactions inherent in these voice types. In order to obtain good synthetic copies of these voices, we need to know the practical importance of accurately inverse filtering and modeling individual voice sources. To this end, thirty different voices were synthesized, each with four different sources. Preliminary results suggest that the output of the inverse filter does not always contain enough information about the source to adequately reconstruct vocal quality. However, the LF model of the voice source pulse does provide enough degrees of freedom to model naturally-occurring quality variations across voices.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Epstein, Melissa / Gabelman, Brian / Antoñanzas-Barroso, Norma / Gerratt, Bruce / Kreiman, Jody (1999): "Source model adequacy for pathological voice synthesis", In ICPhS-14, 2049-2052.