Intonation synthesis intonational form

The majority of this chapter focuses on the synthesis of intonation. The main acoustic representation of intonation is fundamental frequency (FO), such that intonation is often defined as the manipulation of FO for commimicative or linguistic purposes. As we shall see, techniques for S5mthesizing FO contours are inherently linked to the model of intonation used, and so the whole topic of intonation, including theories, models and FO synthesis is dealt with here. In addition, we cover the topic of predicting intonation form from text, which was deferred from Chapter 6 as we first require an understanding of intonational phenomena theories and models before explaining this. 

We now turn our attention to this issue of intonation synthesis itself. In Chapter 6 we described a variety of techniques for generating the prosodic form representations of phrasing and prominence from text. We only made passing reference to the issue of generating intonational form fi-om text as this really required a thorough discussion on the issue of intonational form first. With this job now done, we can describe techniques for both generating intonational form descriptions fi om text and for generating FO controls from intonational form. 

The models differ significantly in what they take as the primary form of intonation. In the AM model this is quite abstract while in the Tilt model this is quite literal or acoustie . These differences in primary form should not be taken to mean that the proponents of these models do not believe that there should be more abstract or more conerete representations, just that the best representation happens to lie where they describe it. In the many synthesis schemes based on the AM model there are other, more phonetic or acoustic levels, and in the Tilt model there is always the intention that it should serve as the phonetie description of some more abstract higher level representation. 

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