Fast Time-Scale Modification of Speech Using Nonlinear Clipping Methods

Among the conventional time-scale modification (TSM) methods, the synchronized overlap and add (SOLA) method is widely used due to its good performance relative to computational complexity But the SOLA method remains complex due to its synchronization procedure using the normalized cross-correlation function. In this paper, we introduce a computationally efficient SOLA method utilizing 3 level center clipping method, as well as zero-crossing and level-crossing information. The result of subjective preference test indicates that the proposed method can reduce the computational complexity by over 80% compared with the conventional SOLA method without serious degradation of synthesized speech quality.