The excitation in a CELP-like speech coder is recursively calculated. For a given bitrate and a given complexity, the recursive approach described lowers the complexity with minimum impact on speech quality. The excitation signal is a sum of at least three vector terms, each vector term being a product of a codebook vector zk and an associated gain term gk. A first vector term g0z0 is determined that is representative of a target excitation vector x. Each remaining vector term is recursively determined as a vector term gkzk representative of the difference between the target excitation vector x and the sum of previously determined vector terms,
Recursively excited linear prediction speech coder