Formant synthesis parallel synthesisers

A particularly interesting event in the history of speech synthesis occurred in 1972 when John Holmes demonstrated just such a parameter-to-speech copy-synthesis experiment with his then-state-of-the-art parallel formant synthesiser [218]. Holmes demonstrated quite convincingly that most people found it impossible to tell the difference between an original recording of his voice saying a particular sentence and a copy-synthesis version of the same sentence. Holmes demonstration was met with considerable excitement and optimism. It had been assumed by many that the synthesiser itself would be too crude to mimic human speech faithfully, but this was shown not to be the case by Holmes. ... 

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