An Agonist-Antagonist Pitch Production Model

Prosody is a phenomenon that is crucial for numerous fields of speech research, accenting the importance of having a robust prosody model. A class of intonation models based on the physiology of pitch production are especially attractive for their inherent multilingual support. These models rely on an accurate model of muscle activation. Traditionally they have used the 2nd order spring-damper-mass (SDM) muscle model. However, recent research has shown that the SDM model is not sufficient for adequate modelling of the muscle dynamics. The 3rd order Hill type model offers a more accurate representation of muscle dynamics, but it has been shown to be underdamped when using physiologically plausible muscle parameters. In this paper we propose an agonist-antagonist pitch production (A2P2) model that both validates and gives insight behind the improved results of using higher-order critically damped system models in intonation modelling.