Simple Synthetic Vowel: how to make it sound more natural

[Andres V]

In the video A Simple Synthetic Vowel we see a demonstration of how to generate a synthetic vowel, but the sound of it is a bit robotic. How can we generate a synthetic vowel that sounds “more natural”? Could a different source sound improve the resulting vowel sound?

[Simon]

Yes, one way would be to use a more complex source than the pulse train. This is what is done in Festival (in diphone and unit selection voices). The source waveform is something called the “residual” and is calculated so that the speech is almost perfectly reconstructed after that source signal is passed through the filter. In other words, the residual compensates for the fact that the filter is an oversimplification of the vocal tract.

We will touch on this at the end of the synthesis section of the course.

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