Intonation Rules for Text Reading

Intonation is the cognitive aspect of the ensemble of pitch variations in the course of an utterance. This perceptual impression of speech melody correlates, to a first approximation, with changes in the fundamental frequency (F0) of the signal. This chapter presents the study of intonation patterns for text reading in Standard Colloquial Bengali for the development of rules and appropriate methods for using them in a text-to-speech synthesis system. In the model presented here, the pitch movements at the syllabic level are considered to be basic. Syllabic stylization uses the closest linear match using linear regression and t the pitch movements are expressed in semitones per second. The sentence level intonation pattern is the sequences of the word level patterns constituting the sentence. This chapter also presents the statistical method for the implementation of these obtained rule in TTS. The model is tested by synthesizing several sentences and the perceptual results are satisfactory.