Continuous wavelet transform for analysis of speech prosody

Abstract

Wavelet based time frequency representations of various signals are shown to reliably represent perceptually relevant patterns at various spatial and temporal scales in a noise robust way. Here we present a wavelet based visualization and analysis tool for prosodic patterns, in particular intonation. The suitability of the method is assessed by comparing its predictions for word prominences against manual labels in a corpus of 900 sentences. In addition, the method’s potential for visualization is demonstrated by a few example sentences which are compared to more traditional visualization methods. Finally, some further applications are suggested and the limitations of the method are discussed.