Prosodic parameterization of spoken Japanese based on a model of the generation process of F/sub 0/ contours

The process of generating an F/sub 0/ contour from a small number of linguistically meaningful parameters, has been modeled quite accurately, and the model has been used extensively in speech synthesis. The study deals with the inverse problem, i.e., that of extracting the model parameters from a given contour, which can only be solved by successive approximation. This paper presents a method for deriving a first-order approximation to a given F/sub 0/ contour from the linguistic information of the utterance, and refining the approximation by analysis-by-synthesis. The validity of the method has been confirmed experimentally.