VOICELESS CONSONANT SYNTHESIS BY PALINDROMIC COPYING OF SELECTED PARTS OF DIPHONES OR POLYPHONES

A method for synthesizing speech using concatenation and Hanning-windows, in which a synthetic waveform is formed by concatenation of suitably selected parts of recorded human speech, the selected parts being windowed out with a Hanning window and copied into suitably selected locations in the synthetic waveform. The method is adapted to synthesize unvoiced consonants and includes the steps of palindromically copying suitably selected parts of the recorded human speech to form a synthesized waveform for the unvoiced consonant using concatenation. The method may be used for diphone, or polyphone, synthesis. The advantage of this palindromic synthesis method is that when the copying process has been reversed the second time there is either no repetition of identical blocks, or else the time difference between repetitions is markedly larger in comparison with known methods, thus minimizing unwanted periodic artifacts in the synthesized speech.