• Login
    View Item 
    •   NWU-IR Home
    • Research Output
    • Faculty of Engineering
    • View Item
    •   NWU-IR Home
    • Research Output
    • Faculty of Engineering
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Predicting utterance pitch targets in Yoruba for tone realisation in speech synthesis

    Thumbnail
    Date
    2014
    Author
    Van Niekerk, Daniel R.
    Barnard, Etienne
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    Pitch is a fundamental acoustic feature of speech and as such needs to be determined during the process of speech synthesis. While a range of communicative functions are attributed to pitch variation in speech of all languages, it plays a vital role in distinguishing meaning of lexical items in tone languages. As a number of factors are assumed to affect the realisation of pitch, it is important to know which mechanisms are systematically responsible for pitch realisation in order to be able to model these effectively and thus develop robust speech synthesis systems in under-resourced environments. To this end, features influencing syllable pitch targets in continuous utterances in Yoruba are investigated in a small speech corpus of 4 speakers. It is found that the previous syllable pitch level is strongly correlated with pitch changes between syllables and a number of approaches and features are evaluated in this context. The resulting models can be used to predict utterance pitch targets for speech synthesisers (whether it be concatenative or statistical parametric systems), and may also prove useful in speech-recognition systems.
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10394/15259
    Collections
    • Faculty of Engineering [1136]
    • Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences [4855]

    Copyright © North-West University
    Contact Us | Send Feedback
    Theme by 
    Atmire NV
     

     

    Browse

    All of NWU-IR Communities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsAdvisor/SupervisorThesis TypeThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsAdvisor/SupervisorThesis Type

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Copyright © North-West University
    Contact Us | Send Feedback
    Theme by 
    Atmire NV