The Tilt Intonation Model

Abstract

The tilt intonation model facilitates automatic analysis and synthesis of intonation. The analysis algorithm detects intonational events in F0 contours and parameterises them in terms of the continuously varying parameters. We describe the analysis system and give results for speaker independent spontaneous dialogue speech. We then describe a synthesis algorithm which can generate F0 contours given a tilt parameterisation of an utterance. We give results showing how well the automatically produced contours match natural ones. The paper concludes with a discussion of the linguistic relevance of the tilt parameters and show that this is both a useful and natural way of representing intonation.