Pitch modifications of speech based on an adaptive Harmonic Model

George P. Kafentzis, Gilles Degottex, Olivier Rosec, Yannis Stylianou

Abstract: In this paper, a simple method for pitch-scale modifications of speech based on a recently suggested model for AM-FM decomposition of speech signals, is presented. This model is referred to as the adaptive Harmonic Model (aHM). The aHM models speech as a sum of harmonically related sinusoids that can adapt to the local characteristics of the signal. It was shown that this model provides high quality reconstruction of speech and thus, it can also provide high quality pitch-scale modifications. For the latter, the amplitude envelope is estimated using the Discrete All-Pole (DAP) method, and the phase envelope estimation is performed by utilizing the concept of relative phase. Formal listening tests on a database of several languages show that the synthetic pitch-scaled waveforms are natural and free of some common artefacts encountered in other state-of-the-art models, such as HNM and STRAIGHT.