Decomposition of pitch curves in the general superpositional intonation model

Abstract

This paper describes and applies a new algorithm for decomposing pitch curves into component curves, in accordance with the General Superpositional Model of Intonation. According to this model, which is a generalization of the Fujisaki model [3], a pitch contour can be described as the sum of component curves that are each associated with different phonological levels, including the phrase, foot, and phoneme. The algorithm assumes that the phrase curve is locally linear during intervals spanned by a foot. The algorithm was evaluated using synthetically generated curves, and was found to accurately recover the synthetic component curves. The algorithm was also evaluated in a perceptual experiment, where speech generated by concatenation of accent curves was shown to produce better speech quality than speech based on direct concatenation of "raw" pitch curve fragments.