An Approach to Affective-Tone Modeling for Mandarin

Mandarin is a typical tone language in which a syllable possesses several tone types. While these tone types have rather clear manifestations in the fundamental frequency contour (F0 contour) in isolated syllables, they vary considerably in affective speech due to the influences of the speaker’s mood. In the paper the Fujisaki model based on the measured F0 contour is modified to adapt for affective Mandarin, and a novel approach is proposed to extract the parameters of the model automatically without any manual labels information such as boundary labels, tone types and syllable timing, etc. The preliminary statistic result shows the model is feasible for the affective speech study.