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-tohuman dialogue. Furthermore, they may be the primary vocal communications method of those suffering from certain forms of aphonia, such as laryngectomees. This paper considers the conversion 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 artificial glottal modulation. Early results show that the proposed method can improve quality and intelligibility over the original whispers when evaluated using continuous speech. It does not require either a priori or speaker-dependent information, is of relatively low-complexity and suitable for real-time processing.