Patent ID: 6804649
Filing Date: 2004-10-12
Classification: G10L

Abstract:
Voice synthesiser apparatus comprising:a source module adapted to output, during use, a source signal; a filter module arranged to receive said source signal as an input and to apply thereto a filter characteristic modelling the response of the vocal tract; characterised in that the source module comprises a library of stored representations of source sound categories each corresponding to a respective morphological category, and that the source signal output by the source module corresponds to a stored representation of a selected source sound category; wherein the source module comprises a resynthesis device adapted to output said source signal and that the stored representations in said library are in the form of resynthesis coefficients enabling said source sound categories to be regenerated by the resynthesis device; wherein the stored representations in said library are derived by inverse filtering real vocal sounds so as to subtract the articulatory effects imposed by the vocal tract, and stored representations corresponding to a particular morphological category are derived by averaging signals that are produced by inverse filtering a plurality of examples of vocal sounds embodying the morphological category.