Speech Synthesizers

[Drew Hutchison]

Sorry for sounding dumb, but speech synthesizers are something I know
NOTHING about.

A vocoder uses some number of envelopes following a signal (the voice) to
determine the amplitude of bands across a harmically rich signal, right?
Can you use real envelopes to do the same thing?  Not necissarily asdr's,
but some implement of "shaping" these lines.  Is this how (some) speech
synthesizers work?  Is this why a vocoder sounds so much like a
speak-and-spell?  Would you use filtered harmonics for these lines, or
just put an osc somewhere within each freq band?  Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Drew