ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

4aSP11. Automatic intonation stylization using a model of pitch perception.

Christophe R. d'Alessandro

LIMSI-CNRS, BP133, F91403 Orsay, France

Piet Mertens

K.U. Leuven, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium

Automatic analysis of intonation is a crucial step towards the long awaited automatic transcription of intonation. A new psychoacoustic model of pitch perception for short tones [d'Alessandro and Castellengo, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 95, 1617--1630 (1994)] is applied to the problem of automatic F0 stylization for syllable-sized units in French. The aim is to compute one or several psychologically justified tonal movements for each syllable. An important property of the model is that it models perception prior to any process of linguistic categorization. The model was implemented in a computer program for tonal analysis. This program contains several procedures: (1) F0 detection and voiced/unvoiced decision; (2) syllabic segmentation, based on loudness and zero-crossings; (3) pitch integration using the model of pitch perception; (4) glissando rate computation, and static/dynamic tone decision; (5) differential glissando rate for complex pitch patterns computation. The analysis procedure described above has been tested through resynthesis. The modelized pitch contours delivered at the analysis stage were taken as input of a linear predictive coding (LPC) synthesizer. The perceptual equivalence between LPC natural speech and LPC modelized speech was demonstrated using a same/different test paradigm, on a corpus of read and spontaneous French.