F0 Contour Modeling for Arabic Text-to-Speech Synthesis Using Fujisaki Parameters and Neural Networks

摘要

Speech synthesis quality depends on its naturalness and intelligibility. These abstract concepts are the concern of phonology. In terms of phonetics, they are transmitted by prosodic components, mainly the fundamental frequency (F0) contour. F0 contour modeling is performed either by setting rules or by investigating databases, with or without parameters and following a timely sequential path or a parallel and super-positional scheme. In this study, we opted to model the F0 contour for Arabic using the Fujisaki parameters to be trained by neural networks. Statistical evaluation was carried out to measure the predicted parameters accuracy and the synthesized F0 contour closeness to the natural one. Findings concerning the adoption of Fujisaki parameters to Arabic F0 contour modeling for text-to-speech synthesis were discussed.Keywords: F0 contour, Arabic TTS, Fujisaki parameters, neural networks, Phrase command, Accent command.