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15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)Barcelona, Spain |
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GIMEL is a new system for the modelling of fundamental frequency in
speech. In its final form, it will automatically assign intonation
labels to text, providing all information necessary for the prediction
of an appropriate F0 curve. Presently, GIMEL contains modules to employ
an adaptable information reduction algorithm that identifies macro-prosodic
turning points in an F0 contour after approximating it with tension
splines.
The first speech corpus whose intonation contours were
modelled with GIMEL consists of elicited speech from French speakers.
For every speaker, the spline approximation was adjusted such that
microprosodic F0 variation was eliminated, and that the average distance
between original and modelled curve was identical for all speakers.
Informal listening evaluation with MBROLA-synthesised voices indicates
that spline-approximated F0 is indistinguishable from the original
contour. Now the turning points in the corpus can be labelled according
to their statistical properties and be used for synthesis.
Bibliographic reference. Werner, Stefan / Keller, Eric / Zellner Keller, Brigitte (2003): "Modelling intonational variation with GIMEL", In ICPhS-15, 1081-1084.