A simple continuous excitation model for parametric vocoding

We describe a continuous-pitch parametric vocoder suitable for speech coding and statistical text to speech synthesis. The spectral model is based on linear prediction. We show that glottal modelling techniques from recent literature can be cherry-picked to produce an excitation signal with properties known to be useful in the above application areas. We further show that the continuous pitch paradigm can be extended to glottal modelling. The resulting vocoder yields synthetic speech that is generally better than without glottal modelling; it has been used in a parametric speech coding application, and is freely available.