Chapter 13

Tonal annotation

This chapter presents SLAM, an algorithm for the automatic stylization and labelling of melodic contours, developed to process intonation in Rhapsodie. This algorithm has three basic specificities. First, the alphabet of melodic contours is directly derived from the speech signal. Second, complex melodic contours are described though a simple time-frequency representation. Third, melodic contours can be described over various linguistic segments that can be specified by the user; in other words, the tonal descriptions provided by the system can be used to present the intonation of segments of any size, larger than the syllable and of any type: prosodic, syntactic, and informational. Additionally, the system handles some specificities of spontaneous speech, such as speech turns and speech overlaps.