Analysis and synthesis of fundamental frequency contours of English sentences

The voice fundamental frequency contour (henceforth the F0 contour) has been known to be an important acoustical correlate of sentence intonation in English. Quantitative relationships between the characteristics of an observed F0 contour and the underlying linguistic information, however, have not been fully clarified. In the present paper, we apply a method of analysis of F0 contours originally proposed for the analysis of sentence intonation in Japanese. The method is based on a quantitative model of the process of conversion from discrete linguistic units into an observed F0 contour, represented by the logarithm of voice fundamental frequency as a function of time. The validity of the model for English intonation has been demonstrated, firstly by analysis‐by‐synthesis, i.e., by showing that the model can produce close approximations to actual F0 contours of English sentences, and secondly by perceptual experiments in which the naturalness of intonation was verified for synthetic sentences with F0 cont...