ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2016

Using Zero-Frequency Resonator to Extract Multilingual Intonation Structure

Jinfu Ni, Yoshinori Shiga, Hisashi Kawai

Human uses expressive intonation to convey linguistic and paralinguistic meaning, especially making focal prominence to give emphasis that highlights the focus of speech. Automatic extraction of dynamic intonation feature from a speech corpus and representing it in a continuous form are desired in multilingual speech synthesis. This paper presents a method to extract dynamic prosodic structure from speech signal using zero-frequency resonator to detect glottal cycle epoch and filter both voice amplitude and fundamental frequency (F0) contours. We choose stable voice F0 segments free from micro-prosodic effect to recover relevant F0 trajectory of an utterance, taking into consideration of inter-correlation of micro-prosody with phonetic segments and syllable structure of the utterance, and further filter out long-term global pitch movements. The method is evaluated by objective tests upon multilingual speech corpora including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Myanmar. Our experiment results show that the extracted intonation contour can match F0 contour by conventional approach in very high accuracy and the estimated long-term pitch movements demonstrate regular characteristics of intonation across languages. The proposed method is language-independent and robust to noisy speech.


doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2016-1607

Cite as: Ni, J., Shiga, Y., Kawai, H. (2016) Using Zero-Frequency Resonator to Extract Multilingual Intonation Structure. Proc. Interspeech 2016, 1522-1526, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2016-1607

@inproceedings{ni16_interspeech,
  author={Jinfu Ni and Yoshinori Shiga and Hisashi Kawai},
  title={{Using Zero-Frequency Resonator to Extract Multilingual Intonation Structure}},
  year=2016,
  booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2016},
  pages={1522--1526},
  doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2016-1607}
}