ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009

The klattgrid speech synthesizer

David Weenink

We present a new speech synthesizer class, named KlattGrid, for the Praat program [3]. This synthesizer is based on the original description of Klatt [1, 2]. New aspects of a KlattGrid in comparison with other Klatt-type synthesizers are that a KlattGrid is not frame-based but time-based. You specify parameters as a function of time with any precision you like. has no limitations on the number of oral formants, nasal formants, nasal antiformants, tracheal formants or tracheal antiformants that can be defined. has separate formants for the frication part. allows varying the form of the glottal flow function as a function of time. allows for any number of formants and bandwidths to be modified during the open phase of the glottis. uses no beforehand quantization of amplitude parameters. is fully integrated into the freely available speech analysis program Praat [3].

s Klatt, D.H. and Klatt, L.C., “Analysis, synthesis, and perception of voice quality variations among female and male talkers”, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 87:820–857, 1990. Klatt, D.H.,“Software for a cascade/parallel formant synthesizer”, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67:971–995, 1980. Boersma, P. and Weenink, D., “Praat: doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.1.07), [Computer program]”, http://www.praat.org/, 2009.