Micro-prosodic control in cantonese text-to-speech synthesis

This paper describes a pioneer study on prosodic control for Cantonese text-to-speech synthesis. We attempt to establish a set of segment-level duration rules and contextdependent F0 profiles and apply them to a syllable-based concatenative speech synthesizer which uses TD-PSOLA as prosodic modification technique. The prosodic features are extracted by statistical characterization of a large amount of speech data. Subjective listening test shows that the micro-prosodic control results in a marginal but consistent improvement in perceptual naturalness.