15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003

Modelling Intonational Variation with GIMEL

Stefan Werner (1), Eric Keller (2), Brigitte Zellner Keller (2)

(1) Joensuun Yliopisto, Finland
(2) Université de Lausanne, Switzerland

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.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Werner, Stefan / Keller, Eric / Zellner Keller, Brigitte (2003): "Modelling intonational variation with GIMEL", In ICPhS-15, 1081-1084.