Use of Poisson Processes to Generate Fundamental Frequency Contours

The prosodic contributions to voice fundamental frequency (F₀) contours can be analyzed into a series of sparser tonal targets (F₀ peaks and valleys). The transitions through these targets are interpolated by spline or filtering functions to predict the shape of F₀ contours. A functional model was proposed in the previous work for this purpose. This paper presents an enhanced version of this model achieved by replacing its decay filter with a Poisson-process-induced filter. It is enhanced because the former is a special case of the latter. The new filter manages to delay the decaying process while interpolations are being uttered. A target point can thus act as target levels, if necessary. The algorithms for estimating parameters, which were implemented on computers, are also presented. Experiments conducted on thousands of observed F₀ contours, including Mandarin, Japanese, and English, indicate that the enhanced version significantly facilitates their automatic parameterization.