When pitch is explicitly modelled for parametric speech synthesis, microprosodic variations of the fundamental frequency f₀ are usually disregarded by current intonation models. While there are numerous studies dealing with the nature and the origin of microprosody, little research has been done on its audibility and its effect on the naturalness of synthetic speech. In this work, the influence of obstruent-related microprosodic variations on the perceived naturalness of articulatory speech synthesis was studied. A small corpus of 20 German words and sentences was re-synthesized using the state-of-the-art articulatory synthesizer VocalTractLab. The pitch contours of the real utterances were extracted and fitted with the Target-Approximation-Model. After the real microprosodic variations were removed from the obtained pitch contours, synthetic variations were applied based on a microprosody model. Subsequently, multiple stimuli with different microprosody amplitudes were synthesized and evaluated in a listening experiment. The results indicate that microprosodic variations are barely audible, but can lead to a greater perceived naturalness of the synthesized speech in certain cases.

中文翻译：

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模拟微韵律效应可以导致发音合成的听觉改善

当为参数语音合成明确建模音调时，当前的语调模型通常会忽略基频f _{0 的}微韵律变化。虽然有许多关于微韵律的性质和起源的研究，但关于微韵律的可听性及其对合成语音自然性的影响的研究很少。在这项工作中，研究了与晦涩相关的微韵变对发音语音合成的感知自然度的影响。的20个德语单词和句子小语料库使用国家的最先进的关节合成V重新合成OCAL Ť RACT大号AB. 真正的话语的基频轮廓提取，并配备与T ARGET -A pproximation -M奥德尔。从获得的音高轮廓中去除真实的微韵律变化后，基于微韵律模型应用合成变化。随后，在听力实验中合成并评估了具有不同微韵律幅度的多个刺激。结果表明，微韵律变化几乎听不见，但在某些情况下可以导致合成语音的更大感知自然度。