Generating F₀ contours for speech synthesis from prosodic and syllabic content

Kurt Dusterhoff

Centre for Speech Technology Research
University of Edinburgh
80 South Bridge
EDINBURGH EH1 1HN

Part of a study published in the Proceedings of the 1997 ESCA Workshop on intonation, Athens, Greece

Abstract:

This paper describes a method for generating F₀ contours from utterances labelled using the Tilt intonation theory. [8] [9] The method uses classification and regression trees (CART) to predict the five Tilt parameters: starting F₀, amplitude, duration, tilt, and peak position. The goal of the experiment is to predict the parameters such that natural intonation contours may be generated from them. Contours generated by this method from a test subset of an American English database have a correlation of 0.60 and a 32.5Hz RMS error when compared with smoothed versions of the original F₀ contour. These results are comparable to other F₀ generation methods which use ToBI intonation labels (0.62 and 34.8Hz, 33Hz).

• Introduction
• Tilt theory
• Speech Database
• Experiment
  • Accuracy measurement
  • Results
• Conclusion
• References
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