Two-stage F0 control model using syllable based F0 units

Syllable-based F₀ units (SBUs) are proposed for F₀ contour generation, along with a two-stage strategy. The two-stage strategy provides a flexible F₀ generation framework by introducing a global model and local model. The local model consists of the SBUs which make it possible to estimate the F₀ contour precisely using segmental information. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can generate a good global model (the measured multiple correlation coefficient is 0.843) and can precisely estimate average F₀ (the measured multiple correlation coefficient is 0.875). It is also confirmed that generating SBUs according to syllable positions is important in precisely estimating the F₀ contour. Listening tests show that speech synthesized with the proposed model is preferred to the output of the conventional model. It is expected that the approach will prove to be useful and powerful for synthesizing various types of speech