Analysis‐Synthesis of Connected Speech in Terms of Orthogonalized Exponentially Damped Sinusoids

The paper reports the results of a digital computer simulation in which a sample of connected speech was analyzed and resynthesized in terms of a series of orthogonalized exponentially damped sinusoids. It was found to be possible to synthesize each pitch period from a function set having only 16 fixed frequencies with fixed damping at each frequency. The processing was done pitch‐synchronously on an IBM‐7090 digital computer, using 10‐bit accuracy speech which had been digitized at a rate of 12000 samples per second. Procedures for generating the sample values of the function set on a digital computer, manual pitch extraction, and data‐processing methods are described. Comparisons of the input and resynthesized speech samples are presented both visually and aurally by means of a tape recording. The results indicate that both the phonetic content and the quality of the speaker's voice are retained in the analysis‐synthesis process. This analysis‐synthesis process, simulated in this investigation, is amenable to real‐time analog realization. (This work was supported by the Rome Air Development Center under contract No. AF 30(602)‐2446.)