Investigation of Pitch and Duration Range in Speech of Sindhi Adults for Prosody Generation Module

Prosody refers to structure of sound and rhythm and both are essential parts of speech processing applications. It comprises of tone, stress, intonation and rhythm. Pitch and duration are the core elements of acoustic and that information can make easy to design and development for application module. Through these two peculiarities, the prosody module can be validated. These two factors have been investigated using the sounds of Sindhi adults and presented in this paper. For the experiment and analysis, 245 male and female undergraduate students were selected as speakers belonging from five different districts of upper Sindh and categorized into groups according to their age. Particular sentences were given and recorded individually from the speakers. Afterward, these sentences segmented into words and stored in a database consisting of 1960 sounds. Thus, distance of the frequency in pitch was measured via Standard Deviation (SD). The lowest Mean SD accompanied 0.25Hz and 0.28Hz received from male and female group of district Sukkur. The highest Mean SD has measured with male and female group of district Ghotki along 0.42Hz and 0.49Hz. Generally, the pitch of female’s speakers was found high in contrast to male’s speaker by 0.072Hz variation. Keywords—Prosody generation; speech analysis; pitch; duration; Sindhi sounds