ISCA Archive Interspeech 2014
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2014

A target approximation intonation model for yorùbá TTS

Daniel R. van Niekerk, Etienne Barnard

A complete intonation model based on quantitative target approximation is described for Yorùbá text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This model is evaluated analytically and perceptually and compared to a fundamental frequency (F0) model using the standard HTS implementation. Analytical results suggest that the proposed approach more efficiently models F0 contours given typical data constraints in under-resourced environments and perceptual results comparing the proposed model with HTS are encouraging.