A Voiced Excitation for LPC Speech.

LPC synthetic speech is often characterized as being unnatural (or "buzzy"). Many researchers have found that one of the main causes of this phenomenon lies in using excitation signals that have the same pulse shape throughout voiced utterances. In this paper we introduce a new method of generating a voiced excitation signal based on the "zinc" function. With this method each pitch pulse can have a different shape and the pitch period can vary slightly within a voiced frame. An experiment involving synthesizing speech using the zinc function to model the residual will be described along with the results. The results of this experiment are preliminary at this stage and further investigation is currently being performed.