Analysis on command sequences of a F0 generation model for Mandarin speech and its application to their automatic extraction

In this paper, we report on Mandarin F0 characteristics analyses using an F0 generation model and present experimental results on the automatic extraction of their control parameters. To cope with difficulties in automatic extraction of control parameters for F0 generation model proposed by Fujisaki, generation command sequences were extracted and analyzed for two-syllable and three-syllable Mandarin speech samples. The analyses showed that there were only restricted number of command sequences and that they were well interpreted by command level merging characteristics. The use of these generation characteristics was turned out to be quite useful for the automatic extraction of F0 control parameters through the automatic extraction experiments for the same two-syllable and three-syllable Mandarin speech samples.