Abstract
Speech pitch period marking usually requires pitch determination first. In this study we regard the pitch period marking as a searching problem through the combinatorial space of local maxima of a speech waveform, and propose an ET algorithm for pitch period marking without going through pitch determination. ET stands for “extending” and “trimming”; extending prescribes a way to explore the combinatorial search space, and trimming specify a way to limit the search space. With resulting pitch period marks and previously proposed binary combination method, a syllable-based Taiwanese synthesis system can be implemented with relatively little effort.