The stylization of intonation contours

This paper presents the stylization of intonation contours and clustering of F0 movements on accented and post-accented syllables based on annotated speech corpora. Special software – PitchLine – has been developed to enable the flexible quasiautomatic segmentation and parametrization of intonation curves. The experimental material obtained from a 15 min passage read by a male speaker included more than 1200 annotated accents and several hundred phrase boundaries. The accuracy of the stylization method was evaluated by measuring the NMSE between original and stylized F0 contours and in a perception study. Stylized F0 contours which were perceived as very different from the original ones required further analysis and re-stylization. Finally, 640 monotonal accents formed 6 clusters and 580 bi-tonal accents formed another 6 clusters. The results of clustering confirmed the correctness of the stylization rules.