A novel approach to the fully automatic extraction of Fujisaki model parameters

The generation of naturally-sounding F0 contours in TTS is important for the intelligibility and perceived naturalness of synthetic speech. In earlier works the author developed a linguistically motivated model of German intonation based on the quantitative Fujisaki model of the production process of F0. The extraction of parameters for this model from the extracted F0 contour, however, poses problems since model components are superimposed in a particular contour and cannot be calculated directly. The current paper introduces a novel fully-automatic multi-stage approach which was applied to a larger speech database of German. After explaining the modeling procedure in detail, the paper presents first results concerning the relationship between the Fujisaki parameters and the linguistic information underlying an utterance