Output details

Modeling and synthesis of English regional accents with pitch and duration correlates

The differences between the acoustics-phonetic realizations of British Received Pronunciation, Broad Australian and General American English accents are modeled and used in accent transformation and synthesis for evaluation of the influence of formants, pitch and duration on conveying accents. The focus is on the modeling of intonation and duration correlates of accents. The intonation correlates of accents are modeled with the statistics of a set of broad features of the pitch contour. The statistical models of phoneme durations and word speaking rates are obtained from automatic segmentation of word/phoneme boundaries of speech databases. Applications include accented text to speech synthesis.