Voice Synthesis

Unquestionably, the most extensive prior work in the 20th century relevant to virtual acoustic musical instruments occurred within the field of speech synthesis [140,143,366,411,338,106,245].^A.11 This research was driven by both academic interest and the potential practical benefits of speech compression to conserve telephone bandwidth. It was clear at an early point that the bandwidth of a telephone channel (nominally 200-3200 Hz) was far greater than the ``information rate'' of speech. It was reasoned, therefore, that instead of encoding the speech waveform, it should be possible to encode instead more slowly varying parameters of a good synthesis model for speech.

Before the 20th century, there were several efforts to simulate the voice mechanically, going back at least until 1779 [141].