Synthesis of prosodic styles

A text-to-speech system can effectively imitate distinctive speaking styles when a few critical prosodic features are modeled and controlled. This paper demonstrates the methodology with a number of examples, including the ornamental notes and the amplitude profile that define the singing style of Dinah Shore, the phrase curve that sets off the dramatic speaking style of Martin Luther King Jr, and the variations of accent shapes between two American English speakers. The styles are described by Stem-ML tags (soft template mark-up language), which offers the flexibility needed to control accent shapes, phrasal pitch contours, and amplitude profiles, for speech as well as for singing.