A system and method are provided for automatically computing local pitch contours from textual input to produce pitch contours that closely mimic tho se found in natural speech. The methodology of the invention incorporates parameteriz ed equations whose parameters can be estimated directly from natural speech rec ordings. That methodology incorporates a model based on the premise that pitch contou rs instantiating a particular pitch contour class can be described as distortio ns in the temporal and frequency domains of a single, underlying contour. After the na ture of the pitch contour for different pitch contour classes has been established, a pitch contour can be predicted that closely models a natural speech contour for a synthetic speech utterance by adding the individual contours of the different intonati onal classes and adjusting the boundaries of these to match the boundaries of the adjacen t intonation curves.
SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETERMINING PITCH CONTOURS