• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.79-90
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• 2014

An intonation curve stylization was used for an acoustical analysis of English speech. For the analysis, acoustical feature values were extracted from 1,848 utterances produced with normal and fast speech rate by 28 (12 women and 16 men) native speakers of English. Men are found to speak faster than women at normal speech rate but no difference is found between genders at fast speech rate. Analysis of pitch point features has it that fast speech has greater Pt (pitch point movement time), Pr (pitch point pitch range), and Pd (pitch point distance) but smaller Ps (pitch point slope) than normal speech. Men show greater Pt, Pr, and Pd than women. Analysis of sentence level features reveals that fast speech has smaller Sr (sentence level pitch range), Sd (sentence duration), and Max (maximum pitch) but greater Ss (sentence slope) than normal speech. Women show greater Sr, Ss, Sp (pitch difference between the first pitch point and the last), Sd, MaxNr (normalized Max), and MinNr (normalized Min) than men. As speech rate increases, women speak with greater Ss and Sr than men.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.131-138
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• 2014

A close-copy stylization of intonation curve was used for an acoustical analysis of emotional speech. For the analysis, 408 utterances of five emotions (happiness, anger, fear, neutral and sadness) were processed to extract acoustical feature values. The results show that certain pitch point features (pitch point movement time and pitch point distance within a sentence) and sentence level features (pitch range of a final pitch point, pitch range of a sentence and pitch slope of a sentence) are affected by emotions. Pitch point movement time, pitch point distance within a sentence and pitch slope of a sentence show no significant difference between male and female participants. The emotions with high arousal (happiness and anger) are consistently distinguished from the emotion with low arousal (sadness) in terms of these acoustical features. Emotions with higher arousal show steeper pitch slope of a sentence. They have steeper pitch slope at the end of a sentence. They also show wider pitch range of a sentence. The acoustical analysis in this study implies the possibility that the measurement of these acoustical features can be used to cluster and identify emotions of speech.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1994.06c
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• pp.107-110
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• 1994

In this paper, we describe the features of the fundamental frequency contour of Korean read speech, and propose a new stylization method to characterize the Fø pattern of segments. Our algorithm consists of three stylization processes : the segment level, the syllable level, and the sord level. For stylization of Fø contour in the segment level , we applied least square error minimization method to determine Fø values at initial, medial, and final position in a segment. In the syllable level, we determine the stylized Fø pattern of a syllable using the mean Fø value of each word and style information for each word, syllable and segment, we reconstruct Fø contour of sentences. The simulation results show that the error is less than 10% of the actual Fø contour for each sentence. In perception test, there is little difference between the synthesized speech with the original difference between the synthesized speech with the original Fø contour and the synthesized speech with the stylized Fø contour.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.21-30
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• 2014

This study aims to discuss pitch slope on Korean intonation curve in spontaneous speech data. For this study, 656 utterances were taken in the spoken corpus and used 'close-copy stylization'. And then the physical feature of pitch movements was extracted for the study. The pitch slope was calculated on the basis of time and pitch range in each utterance. As a result, the average and distribution of pitch slope is similar between men and women in the range of the pitch movement except for essential differences. The slope of pitch movement confirms that there are no differences between men and women. Pitch slope on a scale of -10 to 10 is 90% of the entire pitch slope; pitch slope that moves by time scale without curve is 33.1%; pitch slope that moves half of the pitch bandwidth during the average time for pitch movement is 23.4%; pitch slope that moves 100% of pitch bandwidth during a half of the average time for pitch movement is 10.4%. Those results imply the possibility of standardization methods of Korean intonation by pitch slope.

• MALSORI
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• no.63
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• pp.85-100
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• 2007

This paper aims to propose how to extract intonation patterns using Momel, a pitch stylization algorithm, and to present results of analyzing speech corpora in comparison with those in earlier researches. Two speech corpora are used: one is the sound files obtained from the K-ToBI web site, and the other consists of 80 passages pronounced by 4 speakers (2 male and 2 female). The results show that Momel provides significant pitch targets which can be labeled as H and L tones within prosodic units such as Accentual Phrase (AP) and Intonation Phrase (IP). The resulting AP patterns and IP boundary tone patterns correspond to those in earlier researches. Thus, this study will contribute to the study of intonation as well as to the development of automatic intonation labeling systems.