Towards an evolutionary computational approach to articulatory vocal synthesis with PRAAT

Abstract

This paper presents our current work into developing an evolutionary computing approach to articulatory speech synthesis. Specifically, we implement genetic algorithms to find optimised parameter combinations for the re-synthesis of a vowel using the articulatory synthesiser PRAAT. Our framework analyses the target sound using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to obtain formant information, which is then harnessed in a fitness function applied to a real valued genetic algorithm using a generation size of 75 sounds over 50 generations. In this paper, we present three differently configured genetic algorithms (GAs) and offer a comparison of their suitability for elevating the average fitness of the re-synthesised sounds.