Subjective Evaluation of Synthetic Intonation

This paper describes a method for evaluating the quality of synthetic intonation using subjective techniques. This perceptual method of assessing intonation, not only evaluates the quality of synthetic intonation, but also allows us to compare different models of intonation to know which one is the most natural from a perceptual point of view. This procedure has been used to assess the quality of an implementation of Fujisaki’s intonation model for Basque language. The evaluation involved 30 participants and results show that the intonation model developed has introduced a considerable improvement and that the overall quality achieved is good.