An improved method for shifting the pitches of a tone is disclosed. It comprises: (a) subjecting a digitized original waveform to a whitening process using an all-zero filter (AZF) to obtain a whitened waveform; (b) resampling the whitened waveform at a desired scaling ratio to obtain a scaled and whitened waveform; (c) subjecting the scaled and whitened waveform to a coloring process using an all-pole filter (APF) to obtain a synthesized waveform. In a preferred embodiment, the all-zero filter performs the transformation function of: ##EQU1## and the all-pole filter performs the transformation function of: ##EQU2## wherein the a.sub.i 's and b.sub.i 's are linear predictive coefficients. The whitened waveforms can be compressed and stored as wavetables, which can be subsequently retrieved and decompressed before resampling.