Extraction of Prosodic Features from Speech Signals

Human speech carries two types of information. On the one hand, semantics covers the content of an utterance, on the other hand prosody provides the expression's structure and accentuation. Thus, features in a speech signal are termed prosodic features if their direct segmentation from the syntagmatic run is not possible and a comparison with previous and/or following segments of the signal is required. So the relation between these segments is essential for the representation of a prosodic linguistic function. The prosodic features intonation and intensity are characterized by the acoustic parameters fundamental frequency and sound intensity. The speech rhythm can be extracted by detecting the borders of syllables. The aim of this project is the development of an analysis/synthesis tool in MATLAB and/or Praat, that extracts prosodic features from a speech signal and, furthermore, creates a synthetic signal consisting of these features only. Moreover, their intensity should be adjustable in a GUI.