Robust formant analysis for speech synthesis applications

For speech synthesis applications a formant description of the speech signal has a number of advantages over other parametrizations. The analysis of formant frequencies and bandwidths from the LPC coefficients has two drawbacks: sometimes the number of formapts detected is smaller than is needed for the synthesizer and sometimes due to numerical instability, the analysis fails completely. A method is described to first derive the formant frequencies by means of the Split Levinson Algorithm and second, to find optimal bandwidth values from a table.