Vocoding Techniques

The term vocoder is an abbreviation of voice coder and refers to a loosely defined category of speech and audio processing techniques, which mimic speech sounds. Different professional groups have slightly varying interpretations of the meaning; for example, musicians know vocoders as electronic tools, which modify musical sounds to resemble speech, while for engineers in signal processing, vocoders are methods and algorithms, which mimic speech production. Sometimes, the term voder is used to refer to a voice decoder (i.e., speech synthesizer), whereas in contrast, a vocoder would refer to the combination of both analysis and synthesis of speech. The concept of vocoding was first developed by Homer Dudley at Bell Labs starting in 1928. It was presented to the public at the 1939 World’s Fair ...