Intonation, when used in a narrow sense, refers to fundamental frequency (henceforth F0) patterns in speech that convey information beyond lexical meanings. In a broader sense, intonation also includes other suprasegmental patterns such as duration, intensity and voice quality, etc., that also convey non-lexical meanings. This article will focus mainly on the former, because, as will be seen, F...

Recent studies have revealed that some mammals possess adaptations that enable them to produce vocal signals with much lower fundamental frequency (F0) and formant frequency spacing (ΔF) than expected for their size. Although these adaptations are assumed to reflect selection pressures for males to lower frequency components and exaggerate body size in reproductive contexts, this hypothesis has...

This paper presents a study on the control of fundamental frequency (F0) in Cantonese text-to-speech (TTS) systems. The surface F0 contour of an utterance is considered as the combination of tone-related local components and phrase-level long-term variation. A novel method of F0 normalization has been developed to effectively separate them. Statistical analysis is performed for the phrase curve...

It has been argued that the relative position of spectral envelopes along frequency axis serves as a cue for musical instrument size (e.g., violin vs viola) and shape envelope encodes family identity (violin flute). is further known fundamental (F0), F0-register specific instruments, dynamic level strongly affect properties acoustical sounds. However, associations between these factors have not...

This paper introduces a novel method to separate voiced frames of noisy speech signals into low-frequency or high-frequency. separation improves the accuracy fundamental frequency (F0) estimators. In this proposal, target signal is analyzed by means ensemble empirical mode decomposition. Next, pitch information extracted from first decomposition modes. feature indicates region where F0 should b...

This paper proposes a statistical phrase/accent model of voice fundamental frequency(F0) for speech synthesis. It presents an approach for automatic extraction and modeling of phrase and accent phenomena from F0 contours by taking into account their overall trends in the training data. An iterative optimization algorithm is described to extract these components, minimizing the reconstruction er...

Fundamental frequency (F0) values are reported for 14 children between the ages of 11 and 25 months, an age period characterized by changes in physiological and linguistic development. Subjects were grouped into 3-month age intervals reflecting a continuum of physical development and were audiotape-recorded during spontaneous speech productions. Acoustic analysis of average F0 and F0 variabilit...

This paper presents statistical data for the fundamental frequency of 100 young male speakers of Standard Southern British English producing spontaneous speech under cognitive stress. The material comes from the new DyViS database, for which subjects underwent a simulated police interview. The distribution of F0 in a large homogeneous group of speakers is of forensic significance since it provi...

This paper outlines a method for the MIREX05 contest “Audio Melody Extraction”. The method aims at extracting the fundamental frequency (F0) trajectory of the predominant melody, such as the lead singing, within polyphonic and multitimbral audio signals. The method is based on a multiple-F0 estimator front-end followed by the probabilistic modeling of note events and their relationships. The pe...

A complete intonation model based on quantitative target approximation is described for Yorùbá text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This model is evaluated analytically and perceptually and compared to a fundamental frequency (F0) model using the standard HTS implementation. Analytical results suggest that the proposed approach more efficiently models F0 contours given typical data constraints in un...