Abstract
Problem statement: In the early days of speech synthesis research the obvious focus of attention was intelligibility. But many researchers agree that the major remaining obstacle to fully acceptable synthetic speech is that it continues to be insufficiently natural. Approach: In this study, we exploited microvariations of fundamental frequency (F0) of speech (intrinsic and co-intrinsic effects) to extract micromelody effect in Standard Arabic in view to improve synthesis speech systems. Results: We found that Arabic voiced consonants micromelody effect exists and seems to be possible to be included in a prosodic generating unit by a simple model. Conclusion: This preliminary result need to be tested on larger corpora and must be following by incorporating a microprosodic model of duration and intensity.
Highlights
The analysis of prosody is important[1] in speech synthesis because it gives us the basis for making prosodic effects around our utterance plans and later to arrive at suitable rendering strategies for the marked prosody
Knowing that each consonant can appear several times throughout the used corpus, we have opted for calculation of the median value of each of the 7 points corresponding in microprosodic profile
This choice is justified by the fact that contrary to the arithmetic mean which is considered as an average of size, the median is rather considered as an average of position and it is not influenced by the extreme values possibly very large or very small
Summary
We found that Arabic voiced consonants micromelody effect exists and seems to be possible to be included in a prosodic generating unit by a simple model. Conclusion: This preliminary result need to be tested on larger corpora and must be following by incorporating a microprosodic model of duration and intensity
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