Reconstruction of Continuous Voiced Speech from Whispers

Whispers are an important secondary vocal communications mechanism, that can be necessary for communicating private information and which are an integral aspect of natural human- to-human dialogue. Furthermore, they may be the primary com- munications method of those suffering from certain forms of aphonia, such as laryngectomees. This paper considers the con- version of continuous whispers to natural-sounding speech, and proposes a new reconstruction method based upon the synthesis of individual formants as excitation source, followed by artifi- cial glottal modulation. Early results show that the proposed method can improve quality and intelligibility over the original whispers when evaluated using continuous speech. It requires neither apriori nor speaker-dependent information, is of rela- tively low-complexity and suitable for real-time processing.