Decomposition of pitch curves in the general superpositional intonation model,” Speech Prosody

This paper describes and applies a new algorithm for decom-posing pitch curves into component curves, in accordance with the General Superpositional Model of Intonation. According to this model, which is a generalization of the Fujisaki model [3], a pitch contour can be described as the sum of component curves that are each associated with different phonological levels, in-cluding the phrase, foot, and phoneme. The algorithm assumes that the phrase curve is locally linear during intervals spanned by a foot. The algorithm was evaluated using synthetically gen-erated curves, and was found to accurately recover the synthetic component curves. The algorithm was also evaluated in a per-ceptual experiment, where speech generated by concatenation of accent curves was shown to produce better speech quality than speech based on direct concatenation of “raw ” pitch curve fragments. 1