Synthesizing natural-sounding intonation for Dutch : rules and perceptual evaluation

An algorithm is described for synthesizing intonation in the absence of syntactic information as part of an experimental system for text-to-speech conversion for Dutch. It contains several improvements of an existing algorithm. The improvements are based on analyses of speech data collected from a professional reader. They mainly concern the intonational realization of intonation phrases. The performance of the algorithm has been evaluated in a perceptual test, in which listeners were asked to judge the naturalness of the intonation. For isolated utterances, the rule-based intonation is judged... Mehr ...