Formant Speech Synthesis Based on Trainable Model

The authors proposed a trainable formant synthesis method based on the multi-channel Hidden Trajectory Model (HTM). In the method, the phonetic targets, formant trajectories and spectrum states from the oral, nasal, voiceless and background channels were designed to construct hierarchical hidden layers, and then spectrum were generated as observable features. In model training, the phonemic targets were learned from one-hour training speech data and the boundaries of phonemes were also aligned. The experimental results showed that the speech could be reconstructed with the formant trainable model by a source-filter synthesizer.