Formant-based synthesis of singing

Rule-driven formant synthesis is a legacy technique that still has certain advantages over currently prevailing methods. The
memory footprint is small and the flexibility is high. Using a
modular, interactive synthesis engine, it is easy to test the
perceptual effect of different source waveform and formant
filter configurations. The rule system allows the investigation
of how different styles and singer voices are represented in
the low-level acoustic features, without changing the score. It
remains difficult to achieve natural-sounding consonants and
to integrate the higher abstraction levels of musical
expression.
Index Terms: formant synthesis, singing

Sten Ternström, Johan Sundberg