Generation and perception of F-0 markedness for communicative speech synthesis
Aiming at natural F-0 control for conversational speech synthesis using attributes of constituent output words, F-0 characteristics are analyzed from both generation and perception viewpoints. We recorded commonly used two-phrase utterances consisting of Japanese adjective and adverb phrases expressing different degree of markedness under designed conversational situations, and compared their F-0 characteristics. The comparison showed the consistent F-0 control dependencies not only on adverbs themselves but also on the attribute of following adjective phrases. Strong positive or negative correlation is observed between the markedness of adverbs and F-0 height when an adjective phrase showing positiveness or negativeness is followed to the current adverb phrase. These consistencies have been perceptually confirmed by naturalness evaluation tests using the same two-phrase samples with different F-0 heights. Finally, a computational model of conversational F-0 control is proposed using lexical information of adjectives showing positiveness or negativeness and adverbs expressing markedness. F-0 estimation experiments quantitatively showed the possibility of F-0 control for natural conversational speech synthesis using the attribute of constituent output words. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
corpus-based speech synthesis computational prosody modeling conversational speech prosody perceptual markedness fundamental frequency control