Abstract
One of the most recently proposed techniques for modeling the prosody of an utterance is the decomposition of its pitch, duration and/or energy contour into physiologically motivated units called atoms, based on matching pursuit. Since this model is based on the physiology of the production of sentence intonation, it is essentially language independent. However, the intonation of an utterance in a particular language is obviously under the influence of factors of a predominantly linguistic nature. In this research, restricted to the case of American English with prosody annotated using standard ToBI conventions, we have shown that, under certain mild constraints, the positive and negative atoms identified in the pitch contour coincide very well with high and low pitch accents and phrase accents of ToBI. By giving a linguistic interpretation of the atom decomposition model, this research enables its practical use in domains such as speech synthesis or cross-lingual prosody transfer.
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Notes
- 1.
Six recordings from the initial set of 910 recordings were excluded because they contained the ERROR tag where a boundary tone was expected.
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Acknowledgments
The presented study was supported in part by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia (grant TR32035), and was carried out within the SCOPES project “SP2: SCOPES Project for Speech Prosody” (No. CRSII2-147611/1), supported by Swiss National Science Foundation. The authors are grateful to the company Speech Morphing, Inc. from Campbell, CA, USA, for providing the speech corpus used in the experiments.
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Delić, T., Gerazov, B., Popović, B., Sečujski, M. (2016). A Linguistic Interpretation of the Atom Decomposition of Fundamental Frequency Contour for American English. In: Ronzhin, A., Potapova, R., Németh, G. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9811. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43958-7_6
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