14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
The intonation produced by current text-to-speech systems is often
either flat or artificial sounding. Pitch range is one of the contributing
factors which could be improved by more detailed linguistic
knowledge.
In this study, a corpus of read speech is analysed to provide
information about prosodic structure and pitch range, which can be
used to improve the intonation models for speech synthesis.
The results show how the pitch range variation is most apparent
at a tone group level of prosodic structure, and how phrase initial
and phrase final tone groups have significantly different pitch
ranges from tone groups which are phrase medial.
Bibliographic reference. Clark, Robert A. J. (1999): "Using prosodic structure to improve pitch range variation in text to speech synthesis", In ICPhS-14, 69-72.