Intonational-tune prediction

Here we have explicitly separated prominence from the tune part of intonation, so for our purposes intonation prediction is specifically the prediction of intonational tune from text, rather than die broader definition of this problem that encompass predicting tune, accentuation and sometimes phrasing. 

Of all the prosodic phenomena we have examined intonational tune is the most heavily related to augmentative and particularly affective content. In situations where these effects are absent, we can say to a first approximation that all utterances have in fact the same intonational tune die oidy differences that occur concern where the pitch accents and boundary tones which make up this tune are positioned. Hence we can almost argue that, for discourse-neutral synthesis, there simply isn t any intonational-tune prediction to be done. In other words, the real task is to predict a suitable FO contour that expresses the prominence and phrasing patterns and encodes the suprasegmental, rather than true prosodic, patterns of the utterance. 

While we can describe prominence and phrasing in quite abstract high-level terms, this is significantly harder with intonation because aU theories to a greater or lesser extent make explicit references to FO patterns, levels and dynamics. Given this, and the fact that for the most part we are generating discourse-neutral suprasegmental intonation, we will leave the entire topic of intonation until Chapter 9. 

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Informally we can describe prosody as the part of human communication which expresses emotion, emphasises words, shows speaker attitude, breaks a sentence into phrases, governs sentence rhythm and controls the intonation, pitch or tune of the utterance. This chapter describes how to predict prosodic form from the text while Chapter 9 goes on to describe how to synthesize the acoustics of prosodic from these form representations. In this chapter we first we introduce the various manifestations of prosody in terms of phrasing, prominence and intonation. Next we go on to describe how prosody is used in communication, and in particular explain why this has a much more direct affect on the final speech patterns than with verbal communication. Finally we describe techniques for predicting what prosody should be generated from a text input. 

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