The present invention is a synthetic speech encoding device that produces a synthetic speech signal which closely matches an actual speech signal. The actual speech signal is digitized, and excitation pulses are selected by minimizing the error between the actual and synthetic speech signals. The preferred pattern of excitation pulses needed to produce the synthetic speech signal is obtained by using an excitation pattern containing a multiplicity of weighted pulses at timed positions. The selection of the location and amplitude of each excitation pulse is obtained by minimizing an error criterion between the synthetic speech signal and the actual speech signal. The error criterion function incorporates a perceptual weighting filter which shapes the error spectrum.