A new method for generating sentence F0 contours of Mandarin speech is proposed. The method assumes the F0 contour generation process model, but generates the tone and phrase components in different ways and sums them to produce a sentence F0 contour. The tone component is generated concatenating F0 patterns of tone nuclei, which are predicted by a corpus-based scheme (binary decision trees). E...

This paper presents a preliminary study on acoustical analysis of fundamental frequency (F0) in continuous Cantonese speech. By understanding how the surface F0 contour is determined by many co-functioning and inter-playing linguistic or non-linguistic factors, our ultimate goal is to facilitate automatic F0 prediction for highly natural text-to-speech synthesis. A novel method of F0 normalizat...

In Text to Speech synthesis system F0 contour plays an important role in conveying prosodic information but the process of synthesizing F0 contour from the underlying linguistic information using deep architecture has not been investigated in case of Bengali languages. This paper describes a method for synthesizing F0 contours of Bengali readout speech from the textual features of input text us...

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-ba...

A total corpus-based process of generating prosodic features form text is developed. The process first predicts pauses and phone durations, and then generates F0 contours. Since F0 contour generation is based on the generation process model, it is rather easy to manipulate the generated F0 contours in command level. A method was developed for generating sentence F0 contours, when a focus is pla...

This paper presents the first results of a semanticpragmatic model which assigns a specific label to the relevant words of dialogue utterances and predicts their F0 value. The originality of this work lies in the kind of utterances the model has been designed for: dialogue utterances. The labels of the model represent the degrees of both the expected/unexpected and known/unknown aspects of the ...

This paper examines F0 modeling and generation techniques for spontaneous speech synthesis. In the previous study, we proposed a prosodic-unit HMM where the synthesis unit is defined as a segment between two prosodic events represented by a ToBI label framework. To take the advantage of the prosodicunit HMM, continuous F0 sequences must be modeled from discontinuous F0 data including unvoiced r...

This study compared the prosody of sarcastic and sincere attitudes in Mexican Spanish in terms of three sentence-level factors (i.e. fundamental frequency (F0) mean, F0 range, and speed of speech) and three word-level factors (i.e. stressed syllable duration, F0 movement, and stressed vowel intensity). For F0, the connection between utterance-final activity and attitude was also examined. Acous...

Rhythmic characteristics of speech vary between native and non-native speakers. Studies comparing the rhythmic properties of L1 and L2 speech based on rhythm metrics have shown that this relationship is far from straightforward. It seems evidently the case that the difference between native and non-native speech is a complex interaction of a variety of rhythmic cues (duration, F0 and intensity)...

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of the extent to which age affects F0 and formant frequencies. Five speakers at two time intervals showed a clear effect for F0 and F1 but no systematic effects for F2 or F3. In two speakers for which recordings were available in successive years over a 50 year period, results showed with increasing age a decrease in both F0 and F1 for a female speake...