It is not reasonable to use same number of pulses for all frames with different excitation complexity in linear prediction coding(LPC).For this,number-variable pulse linear prediction coding(NVP-LPC) is presented in this paper.In this algorithm,the number of pulses is not fixed but determined according to the complexity of speech signal.NVP-LPC aims at satisfying the error constraint at the cost of the least pulses,which can be seen as a sparse representation problem.Moreover,the detailed pulse search algor...