Analysis and synthesis of F0 contours of declarative, interrogative, and imperative utterances of Bangla

This study first examines the differences in the gross features of the fundamental frequency contour (the F₀ contour) responsible for discriminating utterances of three sentence types, namely declarative, imperative and interrogative, in Bangla. In order to realize these differences in speech synthesis, these differences are then interpreted in terms of differences in the parameters of the command-response model for F₀ contour generation. Finally, the results of model-based analysis were used to generate synthetic speech stimuli for a perceptual experiment in order to verify the results of analysis. The result of the experiment indicates that the synthesized F₀ contours are quite satisfactory for the perception of utterances of three sentence types in Bangla, and thus can be successfully used in a concatenative Text-to-Speech System of Standard Colloquial Bangla (SCB) developed by C-DAC, Kolkata.