Continuous tracheoesophageal speech repair

This paper describes an investigation into the repair of continuous tracheoesophageal (TE) speech. Our repair system resynthesises TE speech using a synthetic glottal waveform, reduces its jitter and shimmer and applies a novel spectral smoothing and tilt correction algorithm, derived from a comparative study of normal and TE spectral envelopes. The perceptual enhancement achieved by each correction and the performance of the whole system are evaluated on a corpus of thirteen TE speakers using listening tests. Results show that our repair algorithms reduce the perceived breathiness and harshness and out-perform previous enhancement attempts overall.