INTRODUCTION A highly-debated question is to what extent music and language share processing components. Beyond syntax and temporal structure processing, one studied aspect is pitchprocessing in a given domain and across domains (e.g., [1]). Pitch processing is crucial in music. For example, in Western tonal music, it is a form-bearing dimension (next to temporal structures). Pitch processing i...

The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the ...

In this paper, we study tonal variations by training contextdependent tone models from a large speech corpus. Each model represents a tone-in-context and can output a stylized f0 pattern for it. With these tone models, it becomes tangible to investigate f0-variations with plenty of factors. Six contextual factors are investigated to describe tones in this work. We find that impact of a factor v...

This paper proposes a method for detecting word boundaries. This method is based on the behaviour of the pitch frequency across the sentences. The pitch frequency (F0) is found to rise in a word and fall to the next word. The presence of this fall is proposed as a means of detecting word boundaries. Four major Indian languages are used and the results show that nearly 85% of the word boundaries...

This paper proposes a method for detecting word boundaries. This method is based on the behaviour of the pitch frequency across the sentences. The pitch frequency (F0) is found to rise in a word and fall to the next word. The presence of this fall is proposed as a means of detecting word boundaries. Four major Indian languages are used and the results show that nearly 85% of the word boundaries...

In this research, a Text-To-Speech system for Farsi language has been implemented. The proposed synthesizer concatenates Farsi syllables in a TD-PSOLA manner. This paper is mainly concentrated on investigation about pitch variations in Farsi sentences and presentation of some novel rules for modeling these variations. Based on the location of stressed syllable, we obtain a primary pitch curve f...

Modeling Mandarin tones is one of the most important issues in speech synthesis. However, established knowledge is mainly focused on the “production” aspect. In this paper, we first characterized relative pitch levels of tones. Next, two perceptual experiments were designed to investigate “perceptual” relevance of pitch levels and shapes in Mandarin. Results showed that relative pitch levels of...

In this paper an attempt is made to automatically recognize speaker’s accent among regional Swiss French accents from four regions of Switzerland. To achieve this goal a syllable-based classification framework is implemented using prosodic features extracted from the speech signal. Since, among these regional accents, the variations in speech mainly originate from the speaking style, i.e., diff...