On the Relative Importance of Different Prosodic Factors for Improving Speech Synthesis

We present results of perceptual experiments geared toward assessing the relative importance of several prosodic factors in synthetic speech, showing that naturalness, relative to a target speaking style, can be significantly improved through both symbolic label prediction and better F0 and duration generation. Our experiments utilized a novel perceptual experiment paradigm, where we supply each test subject with two reference utterances in order to obtain reliable absolute scores that indicate magnitude of improvement. The approach gives ratings that are comparable across experiments. Results also show a strong interaction between detailed F0 and duration controls.