A system or method for modeling a signal, such as a speech signal, in which harmonic frequencies and amplitudes are identified and the harmonic magnitudes are interpolated to obtain spectral magnitudes at a set of fixed frequencies. An inverse transform is applied to the spectral magnitudes to obtain a pseudo auto-correlation sequence, from which linear prediction coefficients are calculated. From the linear prediction coefficients, model harmonic magnitudes are generated by sampling the spectral envelope defined by the linear prediction coefficients. A set of scale factors are then calculated as the ratio of the harmonic magnitudes to the model harmonic magnitudes and interpolated to obtain a second set of scale factors at the set of fixed frequencies. The spectral envelope magnitudes at the set of fixed frequencies are multiplied by the second set of scale factors to obtain new spectral magnitudes and the process is iterated to obtain final linear prediction coefficients. The signal is modeled by the linear prediction coefficients.