A New Approach to Intonation Analysis and Synthesis of Swedish

The main body of our study derives from the processing of 5 subjects’ reading of a corpus from a Swedish novel. Two of the subjects were females. Intonation contours on a log frequency scale have been sampled and normalised to eliminate differences in mean tonal level and duration. As a result, intonation patterns across speakers are brought out revealing individual performances as well as group average data. A second part of our study has been to develop rules for predicting intonation contours and associated acoustic parameters from a superposition model. Syntactically determined prosodic sentence and phrase contours with associated juncture specifications are selected as a basic frame. Local word accent 1 and accent 2 modulations are added. These as well as phoneme durations are quantified with respect to a continuously scaled and lexically determined prominence parameter, Rs, and with respect to context and position within an utterance.