Corpus approach and Machine learning
When starting out my investigation of musicality of speech I set out analyzing, extracting and abstracting all kinds of musical structures from speech recordings. Nevertheless I thought I should keep the time aspect of speech intact, feeling that it is…
Voice Quality
In addition to intonation (pitch), intensity (amplitude) and speech rate (rhythm, tempo), voice quality (also referred to as “phonation”) is generally considered a part of the prosodic expression. Expressed a bit simplified as a continuum from whispering through normal to pressed…
Consonants
Even though consonants are not treated as part of the prosodic expression, they can still contribute to perception of articulation and pointedness of speech. For that reason, and also to be able to have a natural percussive counterpoint to the…
Syllable prominence
Prominent syllables highlight new or important information and make up an important rhythmical feature in speech. Prominence is determined by a combination of factors including vowel length, amplitude stress, high pitch accents, vocal quality and degree of vowel articulation (unstressed…
Syllable detection
When I started to look at musical traits of speech and how I could go about measuring and analyzing them, I soon realized I needed to be able to quantize some kind of fundamental unit from which I could extract basic…