An improved pitch contour formulation for Malay language storytelling Text-to-Speech (TTS)

In this paper, an improved pitch contour formulation is introduced by modifying the existing pitch contour sinusoidal function. The aim is to convert neutral speech into storytelling speech in Malay Language. Our speech datasets (neutral and storytelling speech) were recorded by a male and a female professional speaker. They contain 116 speech sentences, 1,164 words, and 2,732 syllables. For storytelling speech, 124 prominent syllables are detected using Prosogram tool. These prominent syllables are further categorized into six clusters of pitch contour. Distance measurements using one minus Pearson correlation is done to assess the similarity of the proposed pitch contour formulae to the original storytelling pitch contour. The proposed pitch contour sinusoidal function is also compared with the existing pitch contour function used by previous work. The results showed that the proposed pitch contour formulation performed better than the existing pitch contour formulae.