Evaluation of a speech synthesis method for nonlinear modeling of vocal folds vibration effect

We present a new speech synthesis method for improving voice quality in parametric rule-based speech synthesis systems. We also describe the results of a preference test on speech wave reconstruction to confirm the performance of the proposed method. The method is based on the functional approximation of vocal tract resonance produced by nonlinear interaction between the glottis and the vocal tract. In the performance test, evaluators listen to two kinds of reconstructed speech samples: one is synthesized by the proposed method and the other is by an ordinary LPC (linear predictive coding)-based method. The speech sample set used in this test contains 60 sentences uttered by four speakers. Results show that the proposed method is superior in its quality