Adaptive filter based prosody modification approach

This paper proposes an adaptive filter based prosody modification approach. It consists of three components, i.e., a frequency estimator, a pitch tracker and a prosody modifier. Firstly, the frequency estimator is applied to segment the speech signal into sentences and the maximum frequency level of each sentence is estimated. Then, the adaptive filter that is adapted according to the maximum frequency level of each sentence is constructed. Its output is applied to estimate the pitch of speech. The prosody of the speech, which includes its pitch and duration, is then modified according to estimated pitch and the given pitch modification target. Be compared with existing techniques, the advantage of the proposed approach is its capability of adapting with the frequency of given speech. This advantage makes the approach especially suitable for the large range pitch modification. Finally, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated and is compared with three existing prosody modification approach and the result is quit encouraged.