Rule Based Generation of Fundamental Frequency Contours for German Utterances

Evaluations of text-to-speech systems have shown that systems with sophisticated control of prosody sound more natural than those having a very good control of the sound structure but not so elaborated prosody. This calls for a broad research in the field of prosody, which in the past has received much less interest than the study of segmental sound structure in the areas of both general phonetics and speech technology. Among the different aspects of prosody (intonation, accent and rhythm) the study of intonation, and its expression fundamental frequency (F0), plays an outstanding role. In this paper a method is described which allows the generation of F0 contours close to natural ones from an abstract linguistic model. The model`s principles define a set of labels from which F0 contours are generated by means of rules. The linguistic assumptions of the prosody generation method discussed in this paper are based on the Tone-Sequence-Model (TSM), an established theory of prosodic phono..