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Abstract: This paper presents a new proposal to synthesize natural sounds with less control parameters by combining the inverse speech production and pitch-synchronous articulatory synthesis. The pitch-synchronous excited Reflection-Type Line Analog (RTLA) model is employed as the synthesis filter. Multi-rate system sampling and dynamic scattering wave adjustment are used to handle the variable VT length and the acoustic continuity. The synthesizer is controlled by vocal-tract (VT) area functions. Given the targets of formant trajectories, the dynamic VT area function which is modeled by time variant VT length is derived using an inverse solution of speech production. A distinguishing feature of this method is that artificially specified formant trace can be precisely aimed in the synthetical sounds. Experimental results show that the formant target can be well matched by the synthetic sounds. Potential application to text-to-speech conversion of this method is discussed.

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