Analysis by synthesis of tonal alignment patterns in British English

Abstract

This paper presents an attempt to investigate tonal alignment patterns in British English via a procedure of analysis by synthesis. This study encompasses both a top down and a bottom up approach, enabling to test different models of tonal alignments (anchor points and modes of alignment) previously described in the literature, and to optimize and evaluate the representation of those models. The whole procedure is reversible so that proposed models can be synthesized and their output compared to the original recordings of the corpus.