Speech synthesis

Abstract

The primary way of communicating with others, is that of speech. Man only has the ability to use speech as a mean to communicate with others. Speech generation is one of the most complicated stimuli that humans perceive and in fact, the interaction of the organisms involved in speech generation is very complex. The primary stimulus is generated by the brain, then speech is generated using the vocal tract system, and this message (speech) is detected by the ears which in turn inform the brain. Any malfunction of the organisms mentioned leads to speech defects. Although speech capabilities were developed hundreds of centuries ago, speech experimental research had its first major effort in the last years of the eighteenth century. This was made by Wolfgang von Kempelen, a Hungarian nobleman. In 1791 he published a book, 'The mechanism of speech and the construction of a speaking machine Other investigators made studies about speech and its characteristics during the next one hundred and fifty years. Scientists like Helmholtz and Graham Bell made some analysis mainly on vowel sounds. It was after 1930 with the advent of electronic instrumentation, in particular the oscilloscope and the sound spectrograph, that the understanding of speech acoustics was increasing. This led to the production of artificial speech using electrical circuits and the first electronic speech synthesizer was developed by Dudley in 1939. Dudley analysis techniques were implemented by analogue means. The device was called the Vocoder, where analysis of speech was performed. [...]