A methodology for analyzing prosody

Prosody consists of that information in speech which can be suprasegmental, i.e., operate over units larger than a single segment. Prosodic contours may span a word, phrase, or larger units. The goal of this study is to understand the mapping between discrete, abstract units (e.g., boundary tones, pitch accents) and their observed continuously varying acoustic correlates (e.g., duration and F0). Since prosody synthesis and analysis have traditionally been a challenging problem, the initial focus of this study has been restricted to the FM radio news broadcasting style of speech. This pilot study indicates that in this speech style, prosodic units appear to be more strongly and more regularly marked than in conversational styles. Time‐ and pitch‐scale modification is employed using a sinusoidal model to change the duration and F0 contours of natural utterances. This technique allows synthesis of an utterance with a new prosodic contour, taking the input parameters from a linguistic model of prosody, or fro...