Publication

Abstract : Prosody modification is the process of manipulating pitch and duration of a given speech. The objective of the present work is to empirically determine the extend to which prosody of the original speech can be modified without affecting the intelligibility. The intelligibility of the prosody modified speech is estimated from the word error rates obtained by listening to the prosody modified speech. The recorded utterances of phonetically balanced non-sense text materials, generated using a random set of 200 sentences selected from CMU-Arctic database, are the data set used for the present study. The subjective evaluations resulted in the range of pitch and duration scale factors, which can be used for improving the effectiveness of the prosody modification without hampering the intelligibility of the original speech.