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Degrees of Freedom in Prosody Modeling

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Speech Prosody in Speech Synthesis: Modeling and generation of prosody for high quality and flexible speech synthesis

Part of the book series: Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics ((PRPHPH))

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Abstract

Degrees of freedom (DOF) refer to the number of free parameters in a model that need to be independently controlled to generate the intended output. In this chapter, we discuss how DOF is a critical issue not only for computational modeling, but also for theoretical understanding of prosody. The relevance of DOF is examined from the perspective of the motor control of articulatory movements, the acquisition of speech production skills, and the communicative functions conveyed by prosody. In particular, we explore the issue of DOF in the temporal aspect of speech and show that, due to certain fundamental constraints in the execution of motor movements, there is likely minimal DOF in the relative timing of prosodic and segmental events at the level of articulatory control.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University College London, London, UK

    Yi Xu

  2. King Mongkut’s University of Technology, Thonburi, Thailand

    Santitham Prom-on

Authors
  1. Yi Xu
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  2. Santitham Prom-on
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Correspondence to Yi Xu .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Keikichi Hirose

  2. Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jianhua Tao

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Xu, Y., Prom-on, S. (2015). Degrees of Freedom in Prosody Modeling. In: Hirose, K., Tao, J. (eds) Speech Prosody in Speech Synthesis: Modeling and generation of prosody for high quality and flexible speech synthesis. Prosody, Phonology and Phonetics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45258-5_2

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