ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004
ISCA Archive SpeechProsody 2004

The phonology of melodic prominence: the structure of melisms

Geneviève Caelen-Haumont, Cyril Auran

This paper aims at proposing a surface phonological tonal annotation and stylization fitted to the lexical space. More precisely it makes it possible to phonologically structure the F0 variations in prominent words. In previous studies, this specific F0 configuration in such words has been called melism. These principles are integrated in an automatic procedure (INTSMEL) which supplies an automatic Praat TextGrid labelling. In the overall procedure, INTSMEL (and/or INTSINT) is applied to the output of the MOMEL algorithm which computes targets and modelled F0 contour. INTSINT and INTSMEL have complementary goals: the former is devoted to the annotation of intonation, the latter to the (prominent) word (or suite of words) annotation. The aim of this paper is to describe this annotation method, previously to its exploitation and evaluation in forthcoming papers.