Modeling micromelodic effects in standard Arabic using MOMEL

In this paper, we describe our approach allowing as far as possible, an automatic extraction of the micromelodic information of the speech signal using the fundamental frequency curve and its macromelodic profile obtained by the MOMEL (Modelling Melody) algorithm. The results reinforce the idea that the microprosodic effect exist in standard Arabic and the possibility of including it in a prosodic generating unit by a simple model to provide improved naturalness in speech synthesis.