A Target Approximation Intonation Model for Yorùbá TTS

Abstract

A complete intonation model based on quantitative target approximation is described for Yor`ub´a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. This model is evaluated analytically and perceptually and compared to a fundamental frequency (F0) model using the standard HTS implementation. Analytical results suggest that the proposed approach more efficiently models F0 contours given typical data constraints in under-resourced environments and perceptual results comparing the proposed model with HTS are encouraging.