Posting here, as this has more to do with the human voice itself than electronics.
I am planning to build a simple human voice synth, but I couldn't find much on the internet. The overall plan is to generate a signal, pass it through about 10-ish bandpass filters and adjust each filter's gain to create speech.
For my source signal, I found
this, which seems to be the sound generated by the larynx before passing through the throat and mouth. From what I read online, a relaxation oscillator or a sawtooth wave seems to be a close approximation of it.
One of the things I am struggling to find is the frequency components corresponding to certain phonetics. Though I am pretty sure it is either because I can't find the right keywords or because SEO ruined the internet.
US2121142A is the patent for Voder, the first human voice synthesizer by bell labs. It has a similar structure to what I've been modeling in my head. Should I just use the frequency values here for my bandpass filters or should I use something else?
02-06-2026 08:10:02
I am planning to build a simple human voice synth, but I couldn’t find much on the internet.
Wikipedia has a pretty good overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_synthesis#Synthesizer_technologies
Basically there are unit synthesis approaches (adding together lots of little sound files) and signal-based approaches. I think you want the signal-based approaches, so read that page, find the right terms, then go to scholar.google.com and search for the right terms plus "overview" or plus "toolkit".
02-06-2026 08:27:55
There are, but there's no harm in calling or e-mailing: It could be the start of a collaboration.
02-06-2026 10:35:43
No need to call, I'm sure there are plenty of papers published if you use Google scholar or similar. Or thesis projects on github, etc.
02-06-2026 12:42:19
You might have luck calling around to universities: There are likely dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands of projects like these. The audiology type departments might be a good place to start and there would probably be professors and assistants happy to nerd out about this kind of stuff.
Good luck and be sure to share your progress, sounds fun!
02-06-2026 14:11:54
Lemmy
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