Enhanced analysis-by-synthesis waveform interpolative coding at 4 KBPS

Abstract

This paper presents work based on an analysis-by-synthesis approach which aims to develop a reversible coding system for prosody, capable of deriving a `linguistic-like' surface phonological representation directly from acoustic data that is sufficient to reproduce a synthetic version of the original utterance without significant loss of linguistic information. With such a coding system, capable of representing any significant prosodic distinctions, the task of predicting such representations would be greatly simplified, becoming one of mapping between sets of symbolic representations. This approach has already been applied to the stylisation and symbolic coding of fundamental frequency curves by means of the INTSINT transcription system. An automatic version has also been proposed. This paper presents a preliminary proposal for an extension to the INTSINT system to cover segmental duration and the relative alignment of phonematic and tonal segments. 1. INTRODUCTION: INTSINT TRANSCRIP...