In the natural production of human speech, the instant of closure of the vocal cords occurs usually at well defined instants. These instants are used for speech processing, such as glottal synchronous processing or speech synthesis with observed natural vocal cord excitation signals. To detect the instants of glottal closure from an observed speech signal, the observed speech signal is high pass filtered, and a temporally localized aggregate of the number and amplitudes of peaks in the high pass filtered signal is determined for possible instants of glottal closure. The instants of glottal closure are determined as instants where the aggregate takes maximal values.
Human speech processing apparatus for detecting instants of glottal closure.