Modelling microprosodic effects can lead to an audible improvement in articulatory synthesis

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

When pitch is explicitly modelled for parametric speech synthesis, microprosodic variations of the fundamental frequency f0 are usually disregarded by current intonation models. While there are numerous studies dealing with the nature and the origin of microprosody, little research has been done on its audibility and its effect on the naturalness of synthetic speech. In this work, the influence of obstruent-related microprosodic variations on the perceived naturalness of articulatory speech synthesis was studied. A small corpus of 20 German words and sentences was re-synthesized using the state-of-the-art articulatory synthesizer VocalTractLab. The pitch contours of the real utterances were extracted and fitted with the Target-Approximation-Model. After the real microprosodic variations were removed from the obtained pitch contours, synthetic variations were applied based on a microprosody model. Subsequently, multiple stimuli with different microprosody amplitudes were synthesized and evaluated in a listening experiment. The results indicate that microprosodic variations are barely audible, but can lead to a greater perceived naturalness of the synthesized speech in certain cases.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1209-1217
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of the Acoustical Society of America
Volume150
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 1 Aug 2021
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

Scopus 85113530999
ORCID /0000-0003-0167-8123/work/167214885

Keywords