Prosody and emotion in (colloquial) Greek: its analysis, synthesis and its apllication in Text-To-Speech

This project studies the functional pitch contours in Modern Greek in neutral speech and for two types of
emotion (happy, sad).
First, we describe the pitch movements found in three different speech corpora of spontaneous speech (for emotion-free,happy and sad speech) considering the alignment with syllable structure.
The stylization method introduced by P. Mertens and C. d'Alessandro (1995) is used. It is based on a model of tonal perception which assumes the syllable as the basic perceptual unit for speech.
Then, by means of three laboratory speech corpora (including the same material uttered in three different
ways for neutral, happy and sad speech) we conduct a detailed comparative and quantitative analysis, measuring prosodic parameters of local events (F0 and duration attributes of the pitch contour where the main pitchvariations are captured).
A final goal is the application of our findings in speech synthesis in order to synthesize utterances expressing particular emotions. Our results will be evaluated by perception tests conducted on Greek native speakers.