Accurate pitch marking for prosodic modification of speech segments

This paper describes a new approach to pitch marking. Unlike other approaches that use the same combination of features for the whole signal, we take into account the signal properties and apply different features according to some heuristic. Basically we use a special type of energy contour for pitch marking. Where the energy information turns out to be not suitable as an indicator we resort to the fundamental wave computed from a contiguous F0 contour in combination with detailed voicing information. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed pitch marking algorithm clearly improves the quality of synthesised speech generated by a concatenative text-to-speech system that uses TD-PSOLA for prosodic modifications.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INTERSPEECH
• Authors: Thomas Ewender, Beat Pfister
• Keywords: Contiguous F0 Contour, Detailed Voicing Information, INTERSPEECH 2010, Signal Processing, Signal Properties