An Iterated Two-Step Sinusoidal Pitch Contour Formulation for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Intonation generation in expressive speech such as storytelling is essential to produce high quality Malay language expressive speech synthesizer. Intonation generation, for instance explicit control, has shown good performance in terms of intelligibility with reasonably natural speech; thus, it was selected in this research. This approach modifies the prosodic features, such as pitch contour, intensity, and duration, to generate the intonation. However, modification of pitch contour remains a problem because the desired pitch contour is not achieved. This paper formulated an improved pitch contour algorithm to develop a modified pitch contour resembling the natural pitch contour. In this work, the syllable pitch contours of nine storytellers were extracted from their storytelling speeches to create an expressive speech syllable dataset called STORY_DATA. All the shapes of pitch contours from STORY_DATA were analyzed and clustered into the standard six main pitch contour clusters for storytelling. The clustering was performed using one minus the Pearson product moment correlation. Then, an improved iterative two-step sinusoidal pitch contour formulation was introduced to modify the pitch contours of a neutral speech into an expressive pitch contour of natural speeches. Overall, the improved pitch contour formulation was able to achieve 93 percent high correlated matches, indicating the high resemblance as compared to the previous pitch contour formulation at 15 percent. Therefore, the improved formula can be used in a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer to produce a more natural expressive speech. The paper also discovered unique expressive pitch contours in the Malay language that need further investigations in the future.

Consistent Pitch Height Forms: A commentary on Daniel Muzzulini's contribution Isaac Newton's Microtonal Approach to Just Intonation

This text revisits selected aspects of Muzzulini's article and reformulates them on the basis of a three-dimensional interval space E and its dual E*. The pitch height of just intonation is conceived as an element h of the dual space. From octave-fifth-third coordinates it becomes transformed into chromatic coordinates. The dual chromatic basis is spanned by the duals a* of a minor second a and the duals b* and c* of two kinds of augmented primes b and c. Then for every natural number n a modified pitch height form hn is derived from h by augmenting its coordinates with the factor n, followed by rounding to nearest integers. Of particular interest are the octave-consitent forms hn mapping the octave to the value n. The three forms hn for n = 612, 118, 53 (yielding smallest deviations from the respective values of n h) form the Muzzulini basis of E*. The respective transformation matrix T* between the coordinate representations of linear forms in the Muzzulini basis and the dual chromatic basis is unimodular and a Pisot matrix with the dominant eigen-co-vector very close to h. Certain selections of the linear forms hn are displayed in Muzzuli coordinates as ball-like point clouds within a suitable cuboid containing the origin. As an open problem remains the estimation of the musical relevance of Newton's chromatic mode, and chromatic modes in general. As a possible direction of further investigation it is proposed to study the exo-mode of Newton's chromatic mode

Cross-dialectal analysis of English pitch range in male voices and its influence on aesthetic judgments of speech

This study focuses on the differences in pitch register and pitch span across five accents of English, and investigates their potential effects on judgements of speech. We recorded two male middle-aged speakers for each of the following accents of English: Brighton, Manchester, Perth, New Jersey and Edmonton. Then, we modified pitch register in selected spontaneous speech recordings by raising the overall pitch in the recordings by 5 Hz and 15 Hz using Praat. The entire material was then randomized and prepared for an online survey. A group of 50 respondents (30 female, 20 male) who were non-native speakers of English were asked in a blind study to evaluate both the unmodified and modified recordings on a 7-point Likert scale in terms of their perceived attractiveness, friendliness, prestige and self-confidence. Overall, it has been found that pitch span can be a telling cue when evaluating perceived friendliness for both gender groups, while pitch register can affect male listeners in evaluating attractiveness and self-confidence. Finally, it seems that there is a an upper limit for what listeners can aesthetically accept in terms of pitch register, as the recordings with highest registers were disfavored by our respondents.

Reduction of Benzo[A]Pyrene in Coal Tar Pitch with Cross Linking Monomers

This paper investigated the reduction of benzo[a]pyrene (BaP) in coal tar pitch by modifying with 1,4-Benzenedimethanol, Divinylbenzene and Trioxymethylene. Coal tar pitch was modified by these Cross linking monomers respectively. The content of BaP in product was determined. The results indicated that 48.28% BaP was reduced in modified pitch with 12% divinylbenzene at 130°C for 3 hours; 66.38% BaP was reduced in modified pitch with 25%1, 4-Benzenedimethanol at 120°C for 1 hour; Furthermore, 92.24% BaP was reduced in modified pitch with 25% trioxymethylene at 110°C for 0.5~1h. Pure BaP was blended with trioxymethylene. The C13 N.M.R.spectras of raw material and product were determined, the mechanism probably including C-alkylation.