Extraction of Arabic Standard Micromelody

Problem statement: In the early days of speech synthesis research the obvious focus of attention was intelligibility. But many researchers agree that the major remaining obstacle to fully acceptable synthetic speech is that it continues to be insufficiently natural. Approach: In this study, we exploited microvariations of fundamental frequency (F0) of speech (intrinsic and co-intrinsic effects) to extract micromelody effect in Standard Arabic in view to improve synthesis speech systems. Results: We found that Arabic voiced consonants micromelody effect exists and seems to be possible to be included in a prosodic generating unit by a simple model. Conclusion: This preliminary result need to be tested on larger corpora and must be following by incorporating a microprosodic model of duration and intensity.