Analysis of extracted pitch contours across speakers for intonation modelling in TTS synthesis

The paper presents the results of an analysis of extracted pitch contours of spoken Macedonian across 7 native speakers and 3 discourse contexts. The 125 analyzed intonation phrases (IPs) were taken from a speech corpus recorded for this purpose. Pitch contours were extracted for each of the phrases, and then normalized to the speaker's mode. This allowed group analysis of the contours. In total 8 groups were created based on speaker sex and 4 different discourse functions. Each group was then statistically analyzed and average normalized pitch as well as upper and lower bound vectors were calculated. The algorithms designed for this purpose have been described in detail. The calculated vectors were used as the basis for building linearsegment models used for automatic intonation generation in a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis system.