An excitation synchronous pitch waveform extraction method and its application to the VCV-concatenation synthesis of Japanese spoken words

A novel pitch waveform extraction method has been proposed. Being different from conventional pitch mark decision algorithms, such as the peak search method, this new algorithm decides excitation points based on the phase-equalized residual excited linear prediction (PE-RELP) model. A pitch waveform is extracted from two adjacent excitation intervals by using the asymmetrical Hanning window. The new pitch waveform extraction method takes advantage of being free from the extraction errors caused by the formant resonance and being fully automatic. Therefore, no manipulation is required and no roughness is heard in the pitch-modified speech sound. The superiority of the new method has been ensured by means of spectral distortion measurement and subjective quality evaluation. Finally, spoken word generation by means of VCV (vowel-consonant-vowel) waveform concatenation is demonstrated. Consequently, it has been shown that the generation of very natural-sounding spoken words is possible.