Investigation of Pitch and Duration Range in Speech of Sindhi Adults for Prosody Generation Module

Abstract

Prosody refers to structure of sound and rhythm and both are essential parts of speech processing applications. It comprises of tone, stress, intonation and rhythm. Pitch and duration are the core elements of acoustic and that information can make easy to design and development for application module. Through these two peculiarities, the prosody module can be validated. These two factors have been investigated using the sounds of Sindhi adults and presented in this paper. For the experiment and analysis, 245 male and female undergraduate students were selected as speakers belonging from five different districts of upper Sindh and categorized into groups according to their age. Particular sentences were given and recorded individually from the speakers. Afterward, these sentences segmented into words and stored in a database consisting of 1960 sounds. Thus, distance of the frequency in pitch was measured via Standard Deviation (SD). The lowest Mean SD accompanied 0.25Hz and 0.28Hz received from male and female group of district Sukkur. The highest Mean SD has measured with male and female group of district Ghotki along 0.42Hz and 0.49Hz. Generally, the pitch of female's speakers was found high in contrast to male's speaker by 0.072Hz variation.

Prosody Generation Using Back Propagation Neural Networks for Sindhi Speech Processing Applications

“…The Radio Station Khairpur is the place where the sounds of the selected speakers have been recorded. The entire recording and storing process is identical as described by [10]. The prosodic information exists in recorded sounds intensely considered while the development of the speech corpus with the 16-bit encoding and the 16-kHz sampling rate.…”

“…In the speech database, letters based words taxonomy is essentially considered and segmented sounds are individually stored according to the mentioned taxonomy. The pitch and duration calculation process of the recorded sounds is described in [10]. One or more prosodic information is also calculated by various other researchers like in [21] for different applications.…”

“…In [10] this study, various undergraduate students of our university are selected as speakers for the recording of sounds. The speakers are basically inhabitants of four districts: Sukkur, Ghotki, Shikarpur and Khairpur.…”

Superposition of Functional Contours Based Prosodic Feature Extraction for Speech Processing

“…Still, most agree that prosody is a collection of prosodic features, i.e., pitch, voice quality, loudness, rhythm, speech rate, and pauses. These features help us to understand what individuals are saying [1]. Prosodic feature information is worth recognizing in spoken languages.…”

“…SFC modeling is selected here to obtain Sindhi prosodic information; note that there is no concrete reason for selecting a specific type of SFC approach. Furthermore, there is a limited amount of research on the extraction of prosodic data for the Sindhi language [1,13]. This paper presents a practical application of SFC sound units.…”