Rule-Based Voice Quality Variation with Formant Synthesis

We describe an approach to simulate different phonation types, following John Layer's terminology, by means of a hybrid (rule-based and unit concatenating) formant synthesizer. Different voice qualities were generated by following hints from the literature and applying the revised KLGLOTF88 model. Within a listener perception experiment, we show that the phonation types get distinguished by the listeners and lead to emotional impression as predicted by literature. The synthesis system and its source code, as well as audio samples can be downloaded at http://emoSyn.syntheticspeech.de/.