Intonation Model Research Articles

ТЕМБРОВО- ІНТОНАЦІЙНА СЕМАНТИКА У ДУХОВИХ ПАРТІЯХ СЮЇТИ «ЖОВТА РІКА – ЗОЛОТИЙ БЕРЕГ» ЧЖУ ЦЗЯХЕ: ЄВРОПЕЙСЬКО-КИТАЙСЬКІ ПЕРЕГУКИ

The problem of European-Chinese dialogue and artistic parallels in musical culture is covered in the article. This is one of the most actively studied in the Ukrainian territory, primarily by Chinese researchers. Special attention is paid to the theoretical issues of brass orchestral culture and creativity in the context of Ukrainian-Chinese artistic parallels. The purpose of the article is to highlight the main timbre and intonation semantic models in the brass parties of «Yellow River – The Golden Beach» by Zhu Jia He and show some excitement with famous works of European music on the example of Borys Lyatoshynsky’s symphonic poem «On the Vistula’s banks». The author proposes the concept of «timbre and intonational semantics» and its model, which is substantiated and illustrated in the process of analysis. In his interpretation, the author derives from the «intonational concept» introduced by V.Moskalenko and the concept of «intonational image of the world» by Yu. Chekan. It is concluded that in the symphonic poem «On the Vistula’s banks» by B.Lyatoshynsky the timbre and intonation symphonic expressions are an important factor. Extremely important role in this process is played by brass instruments as «signs» of figurative and emotional semantics of a work related to tragic rethinking of folklore material, its timbre and intonational modulation from the original version to the modern one. The brass parties in the work of Ukrainian culture coryphaeus B. Lyatoshynsky and the Chinese Zhu Jia He are represented by the various timbre and semantic models described in the analysis process. In the symphonic suite «Yellow River – Gold Coast» by Zhu Jia He, the use of similar timbre and intonation models, as in the work of B. Lyatoshynsky, became «symbolic» semantic phenomena of world culture. The study may be of practical importance to future researchers of the processes of European-Chinese dialogue and convergence phenomena in contemporary Chinese academic music, as well as to researchers and performers of orchestral music.

Интонационные модели Н.А. Римского-Корсакова в музыке С.В. Рахманинова

Using intonation models of N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov in Rakhmaninov’s music was deeply motivated by his special attitude to the older contemporary: N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov – along with P.I. Tchaikovsky – was one of the most considered and beloved Rakhmaninov’s composers. The nature of Rakhmaninov’s appeal to the musical patterns of the Petersburg master is determined by the specifics of the personal and creative contacts of the two musicians, which are briefly covered in the article. Cases of particular interest are when a tense semantic conjugation of his own text and borrowings from Rimsky-Korsakov’s music – clear allusions and quotations – occurs in the Rakhmaninov’s works. These particular cases are considered in the article. The article attempts to correlate the described cases with the “influence theory” of Harold Bloom. They form two groups. In the first one, clear allusions to the themes and individual intonations of the senior colleague provide additional depth to own artistic concepts, as in the vocal symphonic poem “The Bells”. In the outro of the first movement, there is a reference to the episode from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronia” – “Walking in the Invisible City” (introduction to the second pattern of the fourth act). The main theme of the second movement evoke associations with the Queen of Shemakha theme from “The Golden Cockerel” of Rimsky-Korsakov. In the second group of Rakhmaninov’s works, such borrowings polemically transform the meanings of the borrowed models. In the “Russian Rhapsody” for two pianos, deliberate rethought of theme from the third movement of “Scheherazade” by Rimsky-Korsakov is obvious. There is a reference to the leitmotif of Bomelius from the “Tsar’s Bride” in the second theme of the first movement of the Second sonata. The intonations of the song of the Indian guest from “Sadko” are distinctly showed in the outro of the Prelude in B Minor op. 32 № 10. In both cases, the signs of romantic exoticism grow into the subjective lyrics, introducing into it the painfully broken note of the Art Nouveau style of the early twentieth century.

About individual style bases of musical authorship

Relevance of the study. Effective preparation of musicians-interpreters for stage activity at the present stage of civilization’s development requires a clear understanding of individual style foundations of musical authorship. Main objective of the study . The purpose of this article is to show the mechanisms of the author’s artistic expression of the composer and performer based on the musical style resources. Methodology of the study . One can notice that in well-known definitions of musical style a complex of musical expressive means, or the specificity of musical thinking; or the interaction of both factors is used as a core feature. Each definition takes into consideration popular varieties of musical style: historical and national styles, author’s style, styles of different schools of music and music trends. Yet, one can observe that the emphasis in the definitions is not on the individual (author’s) musical style, but on more general, collective stylistic phenomena. M. Mikhailov’s definition of musical style, which relies on the phenomenon of musical thinking, resembles F. de Saussure’s well-known ‘language – speech’ dichotomy. To be honest, M. Mikhailov does not use the term ‘musical speech’, but in fact takes into account speech advancement of musical thought, which occurs based on musical and intonation listening experience. Results and conclusions. Within development of M. Mikhailov’s approach, the concept of ‘style of musical creativity’ is proposed. It is defined as ‘the specificity of the world perception and musical thinking of the individual, which is expressed by the system of musical and speech resources of the musical piece, interpretation and performance of a musical work.’ The novelty of the concept is provided by the ‘system of musical and speech resources.’ In musical thinking, this system reflects the intermediate situation between the ‘musical language’ and the ‘musical speech.’ The main component of the system of musical and speech resources is the triad: Intonation model  intoning  intonation The first element of the triad is a thesaurus of musical and intonation representations fixed in the memory of the individual that creates something. This is a sphere of common – musical language. The last element of the triad is the final result – musical intonation in sounding. This is the realm of something single, artistically unique. In the end we explain how differently the model operates in composer’s and performing musician’s work

V. Telychko’s “Children’s Album” as an example of the modern tonal image of the world: peculiarities of the musical vocabulary and melodic ideas.

V. Telychko’s “Children’s Album” as an example of the modern tonal image of the world: peculiarities of the musical vocabulary and melodic ideas.

V. Telychko’s “Children’s Album” as an example of the modern tonal image of the world: peculiarities of the musical vocabulary and melodic ideas.

V. Telychko’s “Children’s Album” as an example of the modern tonal image of the world: peculiarities of the musical vocabulary and melodic ideas.

Стилевые особенности песенного фольклора Белгородско-Курского пограничья: локальный аспект

The content of the article discloses the musical styles of songs of various genres of the regional tradition of the Podolkha village of the Prokhorov District of the Belgorod Region as a bright example of the traditional song culture of the Belgorod-Kursk territory of the basin of the Psyol River. This research disclosed the existence of calendar farming songs (spring, summer), which are characterized by a narrow range of sound, the simplest motor rhythmic patterns, laconic compositional structures and heterophonic texture. The integral and archaic qualities of the folksong tradition have been demonstrated by the broad circulation of karagods (a variety of round-dances, moving in circles with songs), tanki (moving in circles while singing songs and holding hands), “shirinki” (round dances with towels), original forms of “gulba” (folk festivities), and the developed male choreographic elements of “khozuny.” The wedding karagod songs are performed in fast tempos while dancing, have a common compositional structure and refrains with the words “aliley,” “lyoli-lyoli,” “ladu-ladu,” dushelmoya” [“my soul”]). In the texts of these genres there is a predominance of syllabic poetic structure, as well as a present of tunes with tonic verse. the range of the karagod, tanki and wedding songs is based on intervals of fourths and fifths. The ambitus (sound range of the mode) of the interval of the sixth present in some of the songs can be explained by a tertial superstructure of the top voice to the main voice. The melodic composition is realized by means of varied repetitions of one modal and intonational model. The singing model is strong and intense, as the result of which there exists the expression of “shouting” or “crying out” a song. Keywords: singing tradition, stylistic features, karagod, “tanok,” “gulba,” sound range, rhythmic patterns, compositional structure, heterophony.

Analysis and modeling of the intonation of Chinese unmarked questions

Analysis and modeling of the intonation of Chinese unmarked questions

Comparing visualization techniques for learning second language prosody

Abstract We tested the usability of prosody visualization techniques for second language (L2) learners. Eighteen Danish learners realized target sentences in German based on different visualization techniques. The sentence realizations were annotated by means of the phonological Kiel Intonation Model and then analyzed in terms of (a) prosodic-pattern consistency and (b) correctness of the prosodic patterns. In addition, the participants rated the usability of the visualization techniques. The results from the phonological analysis converged with the usability ratings in showing that iconic techniques, in particular the stylized “hat pattern” visualization, performed better than symbolic techniques, and that marking prosodic information beyond intonation can be more confusing than instructive. In discussing our findings, we also provide a description of the new Danish-German learner corpus we created: DANGER. It is freely available for interested researchers upon request.

Intonation modelling using a muscle model and perceptually weighted matching pursuit

We propose a physiologically based intonation model using perceptual relevance. Motivated by speech synthesis from a speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) point of view, we aim at a language independent way of modelling intonation. The model presented in this paper can be seen as a generalisation of the command response (CR) model, albeit with the same modelling power. It is an additive model which decomposes intonation contours into a sum of critically damped system impulse responses. To decompose the intonation contour, we use a weighted correlation based atom decomposition algorithm (WCAD) built around a matching pursuit framework. The algorithm allows for an arbitrary precision to be reached using an iterative procedure that adds more elementary atoms to the model. Experiments are presented demonstrating that this generalised CR (GCR) model is able to model intonation as would be expected. Experiments also show that the model produces a similar number of parameters or elements as the CR model. We conclude that the GCR model is appropriate as an engineering solution for modelling prosody, and hope that it is a contribution to a deeper scientific understanding of the neurobiological process of intonation.

Towards a model of Tatar intonational phonology

This study is a preliminary report of our ongoing research investigating an Autosegmental-Metrical model of intonational phonology of Kazan Tatar, a Turkic language spoken in Tatarstan, Russia. Tonal patterns of neutral focus utterances were examined by varying the length of words and phrases, the location of stresses, syntactic structures, and sentence types. Results suggest that Tatar has three prosodic units marked by intonation. They are the Accentual Phrase (AP), the Intermediate Phrase (ip), and the Intonational Phrase (IP). An AP has one or more words and has an optional initial high tone (Hi), realized at the left edge or leftmost stressed syllable of the AP, and an obligatory rising pitch accent (L + H*) aligned with the rightmost stressed syllable of the AP. Interestingly, the unstressed syllables after the pitch accented syllable show high f0 until the end of the AP, suggesting an optional AP-final H tone (Ha). An ip is marked by a phrase-final high tone (H-) realized on an ip-final syllable, which is slightly longer than AP-final syllable. Finally, an IP is marked by a phrase-final boundary tone realized on a substantially lengthened syllable. A fuller model of Tatar will be compared with the intonation models of other Turkic languages.

The Significance of the Level Tone in Ghanaian English: Evidence from Spoken Discourse

In Brazil’s (1985, 1997) discourse intonation model, the level tone is used by speakers to make choices that do not have any real communicative significance within the context of interaction. According to the model, a speaker assigns the level tone in ritualized, unplanned, preplanned, prerecorded, formulaic language, and in reading out. The current study investigates the functions of the level tone in Ghanaian English using Brazil’s discourse intonation framework. Data consisting of 13 hours of conversations recorded from 200 Ghanaians were subjected to both auditory and acoustic analyses. Results show that Ghanaians perform other communicative functions with the level tone in addition to what the model posits. Based on the results, it is argued that the level tone performs significant communicative functions similar to the falling or rising tones in Ghanaian English.

A model of Mandarin Chinese question intonation

Echo questions in Mandarin Chinese provide an interesting case study of the interaction between lexical tone and intonation because it appears that echo questions are distinguished from declaratives by modifying the F0 trajectory of the sentence-final lexical tone in ways that depend on the identity of that tone. The most general effect is that the offset of the final tone is higher in a question than in a declarative rendition of the same sentence. If the final tone is high or falling, F0 is raised throughout the tone, but if the final tone if low or rising, the F0 minimum is not raised in questions. We propose a quantitative analysis according to which question intonation consists of a high boundary tone realized simultaneously with the offset of the final lexical tone. Compromise between the boundary tone and targets for the lexical tone results in raising of the offset of the tone. Additional effects result from interactions with other targets pertaining to the shape of the lexical tone. For example, simply raising the offset of a falling tone would result in failure to realize a sufficiently steep fall, so the onset of the fall is raised as well.

Quantitative intonation modeling of interrogative sentences for Mandarin speech synthesis

Previous intonational research on Mandarin has mainly focused on the prosody modeling of statements or the prosody analysis of interrogative sentences. To support related speech technologies, e.g., Text-to-Speech, the quantitative modeling of intonation of interrogative sentences with a large-scale corpus still deserves attention. This paper summarizes our work on the quantitative prosody modeling of interrogative sentence in Mandarin. A large-scale natural speech corpus was used in this study. By extracting the pitch contours and fitting the intonation curves, we found that F0 declination and final lowering both existed in interrogative sentences, while they were claimed to be absent in Mandarin in some previous studies. In addition, the declination function could be modeled linearly, and the bearing unit of final lowering in Mandarin was found to be the last prosodic word in the utterance, regardless of its length, rather than a fixed duration range. It was argued in this study that the difference between this finding and the commonly believed rising intonation of the interrogative sentences resulted from the nonlinear relationship between prosody production and perception. The underlying mechanism for the existence of F0 declination and final lowering in interrogative sentences is also discussed.

The Phonetics and Phonology of the Polish Calling Melodies

Two calling melodies of Polish were investigated, the routine call, used to call someone for an everyday reason, and the urgent call, which conveys disapproval of the addressee's actions. A Discourse Completion Task was used to elicit the two melodies from Polish speakers using twelve names from one to four syllables long; there were three names per syllable count, and speakers produced three tokens of each name with each melody. The results, based on eleven speakers, show that the routine calling melody consists of a low F0 stretch followed by a rise-fall-rise; the urgent calling melody, on the other hand, is a simple rise-fall. Systematic differences were found in the scaling and alignment of tonal targets: the routine call showed late alignment of the accentual pitch peak, and in most instances lower scaling of targets. The accented vowel was also affected, being overall louder in the urgent call. Based on the data and comparisons with other Polish melodies, we analyze the routine call as LH* !H-H% and the urgent call as H* L-L%. We discuss the results and our analysis in light of recent findings on calling melodies in other languages, and explore their repercussions for intonational phonology and the modeling of intonation.

The Importance of a Distributional Approach to Categoriality in Autosegmental-Metrical Accounts of Intonation

When annotating a speech signal using an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation, transcribers associate portions of the F0 contour with labels from a finite inventory of tonal categories. In the models we are concerned with here, these categories have the status of phonological units (phonological form), bridging the intrinsic variability of the speech signal (substance) with the intrinsic fuzziness of post-lexical function (meaning). This, together with the relatively small size of the label inventory, precludes a one-to-one relationship between form and substance, and/or between form and function. A Neapolitan Italian corpus of read speech is used to investigate the distributional properties of two pitch accents that have been studied extensively with respect to substance (the alignment of F0 peaks) and meaning (sentence modality). Although there is a general consensus that peaks in this variety are aligned earlier in declaratives than in interrogatives, evidence is provided of contexts in which the converse is true, i.e., in which interrogative peaks are even earlier than their declarative counterparts. In this respect, interrogatives have a richer internal structure than declaratives. We argue that differences in how variably a prosodic category is encoded can be dealt with in an intonation transcription system, as long as this system relates phonological form (the choice of pitch accent in this case) both to phonetic substance and to meaning in a transparent way.

Postfocal Downstep in German.

This article is a follow-up study of Féry and Kügler (2008. Pitch accent scaling on given, new and focused constituents in German. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 680-703). It reports on an experiment of the F0 height of potential pitch accents in the postfocal region of German sentences and addresses in this way an aspect of the influence of information structure on the intonation of sentences that was left open in the previous article. The results of the experiment showed that, when several constituents are located in this position, they are often in a downstep relation, but are rarely upstepped. In 37% of the cases, the pitch accents are only realized dynamically and there is no down- or upstepping. We interpret these results as evidence that postfocal constituents are phrased independently. The data examined speak against a model of postfocal intonation in which postfocal phrasing is eliminated and all accents are reduced to zero. Instead, the pitch accents are often present, although reduced. Moreover, the facts support the existence of prosodic phrasing of the postfocal constituents; the postfocal position implies an extremely compressed register, but no dephrasing or systematic complete deaccentuation of all pitch accents. We propose adopting a model of German intonation in which prosodic phrasing is determined by syntactic structure and cannot be changed by information structure. The role of information structure in prosody is limited to changes in the register relationship of the different parts of the sentence. Prefocally, there is no or only little register compression because of givenness. Postfocally, register compression is the rule. A model of intonation must take this asymmetry into account.

Novel Estimation Method for the Superpositional Intonation Model

Fujisaki’s intonation model parameterizes the F0’s contour efficiently and because of its strong physiological basis has been successfully tested in different languages. One problem that has not been fully addressed is the extraction of the model’s parameters, i.e., given a sentence, which model’s parameter values best describe its intonation. Most of the proposed methods strive to optimize the parameters so as to obtain the best fit for the F0 contour globally. In this paper we propose to use text information from the sentence as the main guide or reference for adjusting the parameters. We present a method that defines a set of rules to fix and optimize the model’s parameters. Optimization never loses sight of the text structure events that arouse it. When text information is not enough, the algorithm predicts parameters from F0 contour and tie them to the text. The process of parameter estimation can be seen as a way to go from text information to the F0 contour. Parameter optimization is carried out to fit the F0 contour locally. Our novel approach can be implemented manually or automatically. We present examples of manual implementation and the quantitative results of the automatic one. Tested on three corpora in Spanish, English and German, our automatic method shows a performance of 34% better than other tested methods.

Prosodically Rich Speech Synthesis Interface Using Limited Data of Celebrity Voice

To enhance the communication between human and robots at home in the future, speech synthesis interfaces are indispensable that can generate expressive speech. In addition, synthesizing celebrity voice is commercially important. For these issues, this paper proposes techniques for synthesizing natural-sounding speech that has a rich prosodic personality using a limited amount of data in a text-to-speech (TTS) system. As a target speaker, we chose a well-known prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, who has a good prosodic personality in his speeches. To synthesize natural-sounding and prosodically rich speech, accurate phrasing, robust duration prediction, and rich intonation modeling are important. For these purpose, we propose pause position prediction based on conditional random fields (CRFs), phone-duration prediction using random forests, and mora-based emphasis context labeling. We examine the effectiveness of the above techniques through objective and subjective evaluations.

Automatic prosodic tone choice classification with Brazil’s intonation model

This paper examines the performance of automatically classifying five tone choices (i.e., falling, rising, rising-falling, falling-rising, and neutral) of Brazil's intonation model. We tested two machine learning classifiers (neural network and boosting ensemble) in two configurations (multi-class and pairwise coupling) and a rule-based classifier. Three sets of acoustic features built from the TILT and Bezier pitch contour models and a new four-point pitch contour model we introduced here were investigated. Tone choices are one of the key elements of Brazil's prosodic intonation model. We found the rule-based classifier, which was built on our four-point model, achieved better results than the others with an accuracy of 75.1 % and a Cohen's kappa coefficient of 0.73. This research proves that it is possible to classify tone choices with an accuracy reaching close to the percentage of agreement between two human analysts. The findings further concluded that our four-point model was better for classifying Brazil's tone choices than both of the TILT or Bezier models.

When pitch Accents Encode Speaker Commitment: Evidence from French Intonation.

Recent studies on a variety of languages have shown that a speaker's commitment to the propositional content of his or her utterance can be encoded, among other strategies, by pitch accent types. Since prior research mainly relied on lexical-stress languages, our understanding of how speakers of a non-lexical-stress language encode speaker commitment is limited. This paper explores the contribution of the last pitch accent of an intonation phrase to convey speaker commitment in French, a language that has stress at the phrasal level as well as a restricted set of pitch accents. In a production experiment, participants had to produce sentences in two pragmatic contexts: unbiased questions (the speaker had no particular belief with respect to the expected answer) and negatively biased questions (the speaker believed the proposition to be false). Results revealed that negatively biased questions consistently exhibited an additional unaccented F0 peak in the preaccentual syllable (an H+!H* pitch accent) while unbiased questions were often realized with a rising pattern across the accented syllable (an H* pitch accent). These results provide evidence that pitch accent types in French can signal the speaker's belief about the certainty of the proposition expressed in French. It also has implications for the phonological model of French intonation.