Intonation: Theory, Models, and Applications Athens, Greece September 18-20, 1997

Natural Tone Contours in a Mandarin Chinese Speech Synthesizer

H. Ding, Jörg Helbig

Technical University of Dresden, Department of Electrical Engineering, Laboratory of Technical Acoustics, Dresden, Germany

This paper describes the introduction of natural tone contours in a syllable-based Chinese speech synthesis system. The speech units are waveforms of monosyllables extracted from carrier sentences. In order to maintain the natural tone contours, the syllables were recorded with all possible tonal variation. Using the PSOLA algorithm, the sentence intonation contour is overlayed by the unit inherent tone structures. The intonation modell was applied to synthesize simple sentences and a listening test was conducted to test the acceptance of the model. It shows that the approach can provide a high naturalness of the resulting intonation patterns and preserves the variability of tone contours.

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Bibliographic reference.  Ding, H. / Helbig, Jörg (1997): "Natural tone contours in a Mandarin Chinese speech synthesizer", In INT-1997, 95-98.