Quad-band excitation for low bit rate speech coding

The excitation parameters of a multiband excitation model for speech production consist of a pitch period and a series of voiced/unvoiced (v/uv) decisions for a number of fixed frequency bands around the harmonics of the fundamental. In this paper, it is shown that, at most, four v/uv variable-length nonoverlapping frequency bands spanning over the telephone bandwidth are adequate to represent the excitation spectrum that provides an improved modeling of mixed voicing and noisy speech. A quad-band excitation (QBE) method is presented which generates excitation source for a linear prediction vocoder for low bit rate transmission of speech signal and the DRT scores validate the potential of the method. (C) 1996 Acoustical Society of America.