Modeling of Vocal Styles Using Portable Features and Placement Rules

This paper presents a mathematical description of style in speech and singing. These styles are represented as a set of portable prosodic features along with a set of rules to choose where the features are to be applied. Speakers and singers make creative choices to express their personal style, which may involve specific accent shapes, phrase curves, or (similarly) musical embellishment. Therefore a quantitative model of style needs to support unconstrained accent and phrase curve description, and to solve potential conflicts that arise from this freedom. Our current implementation modifies two acoustic parameters: pitch and loudness. We use an articulator-based model, Stem-ML, to resolve conflicts between intended accents or embellishments and their environment. We present several examples to illustrate the modeling of accents and phrase curves, as well as the usefulness of style/content separation, and the similarity between speech and music.