Track-draw: A graphical interface for controlling the parameters of a speech synthesizer

Abstract

In this report we describe a graphical interface for generating voiced speech using a frequency-domain implementation of the Klatt (1980) cascade formant synthesizer. The input to the synthesizer is a set of parameter vectors, called tracks, which specify the overall amplitude, fundamental frequency, formant frequencies, and formant bandwidths at specified time intervals. Tracks are drawn with the aid of a computer mouse that can be used either in point-draw mode, which selects a parameter value for a single time frame, or in line-draw mode, which uses piecewise linear interpolation to connect two user-selected endpoints. Three versions of the program are described: (1) SYNTH draws tracks on an empty time-frequency grid, (2) SPECSYNTH creates a spectrogram of a recorded signal upon which tracks can be superimposed, and (3) SWSYNTH is similar to SPECSYNTH, except that it generates sine-wave speech (Remez, Rubin, Pisoni, & Carrell, 1981) using a set of time-varying sinusoids rather than cascaded formants. The program is written for MATLAB, an interactive computing environment for matrix computation. Track-Draw provides a useful tool for investigating the perceptually salient properties of voiced speech and other sounds. © 1994 Psychonomic Society, Inc.