Generation of F 0 Contours for Mandar in Speech in Combination with Rule-based and Corpus-based Methods

A method was developed for synthesizing sentence fundamental frequency (F0) contours of Mandarin speech. It is based on representing an F0 contour in logarithmic frequency scale as a superposition of tone components on phrase components as in the case of generation process model (F0 model). The tone components are realized by concatenating their fragments at tone nuclei predicted by a corpus-based method, while the phrase components are generated by rules under the F0 model framework. To keep the time-alignment between the phrase and tone components, the phrase components are first generated and their information is added to the inputs for the prediction of tone nucleus F0 patterns. Result of listening tests on synthetic speech with the synthesized F0 contours verified the validity of the developed method. Furthermore, it was shown through an experiment of word emphasis that a flexible F0 control was possible by the proposed method.