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<p class="MsoNormal">My asking what anyone hoped to accomplish with something dubbed a “Vocoder” was meant to suggest that anyone undertaking such a task (particularly if doing it in analog!) needs to have studied “prior art” and to state a plan going forward.<span style="">
</span>Presumably the goal is NOT to achieve a communication channel, or to reproduce a (classic – 60 year old) Vocal Encoder/Decoder for a quirky “robot voice”.
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<p class="MsoNormal">I would hope the model was rather an attempt to capture the spectral shape of a segment of speech or singing (most likely of successive “frames” of perhaps 50 msec each) and impose this shape on an entirely new (artificial) excitation.<span style="">
</span>For example, you might in two second say: ”Dogs and cats each hates the other” and analyze the resulting 40 frames into a sequence of formants - “40 frequency responses”.<span style="">
</span>If we HAD also analyzed for the original excitation (like pitch - not just the formants), and used this to excite the filter profiles in sequence, we might have some garbled notion of cats and dogs.<span style="">
</span>Played back with some synthetic substitute excitation (perhaps a saw or noise) we would hope for some vague feeling of a vocal origin capturing our interest if not imparting any verbal information.<span style="">
</span>But presumably we were not intending to RECOVER speech, so the achievement of a NEW vocal-like impression is what we wanted.
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<p class="MsoNormal">This experiment (and use) is at least 45 years old.<span style="">
</span>Better name than vocoder? </p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">- Bernie</p>
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