A functional model for generation of local components of F0 contours in Chinese

A new functional model is introduced, which is designed to simulate the control mechanism for generating the local component of the F0 (fundamental frequency) contour. With this model, two kinds of motor command are defined to control the model parameters in order to generate two basic rise-fall feature patterns. On the logarithmic scale of fundamental frequency, the local component of an F0 contour is approximated by the algebraic sum of these patterns. The experimental results in analyzing and synthesizing Chinese F0 contours indicate that real F0 contours can always be approximated very closely by the model, and a close correlation exists between the model parameters and the structure of the rise-fall pattern