The modelling of F0 contours

There is interest in speech research for a model that captures all the relevant features of the intonation contour. Such a model is capable of generating natural intonation contours from the minimum amount of input data. Much of the work on this type of modelling has been performed for Dutch (1). Their model gave a result that was "perceptually-equivalent" to an original contour. A deficiency in this type of description is that perceptually-equivalent is not synonymous with natural. Although a contour may be perceived as being equivalent to an original, it may not necessarily be indistinguishable in an auditory sense from an original intonation contour. The model described in this paper has the capacity to produce intonation contours for English that are perceptually-equivalent and also auditorily indistinguishable from the original. The model consists of the concatenation of contour segments; each segment being modelled by a quadratic equation.