@InProceedings{Ding2017_223,
author = {Hongwei Ding and Rüdiger Hoffmann and Oliver Jokisch},
booktitle = {Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2017},
title = {Prosodic Correlates of Voice Preference in Mandarin Chinese and German: A Cross-linguistic Comparison},
year = {2017},
editor = {Jürgen Trouvain and Ingmar Steiner and Bernd Möbius},
month = mar,
pages = {83--90},
publisher = {TUDpress, Dresden},
abstract = {To find a pleasant voice for speech synthesis is of vital importance to
the system. In this study we investigated the influence of prosodic parameters on
voice preference from a cross-linguistic perspective. We conducted two voice preference
tests. 24 German and 50 Chinese listeners took part in the first test on
German speaker selection; while 25 Chinese and 10 German listeners participated
in the second one on Chinese speaker selection. Then we employed Momel algorithm
to extract 18 purely acoustic parameters, which are supposed to capture the
prosodic pitch change patterns of these speakers. The results showed that there
were strong correlations between the ranking scores of German and Chinese listeners
on both German and Chinese speakers. However, the Chinese listeners showed
more correlations between their voice preference and the melody metrics than the
German listeners. The Chinese listeners preferred larger pitch changes in Mandarin
Chinese. The experiment results suggested that a pleasant voice can have some
prosodic characteristics, which makes an agreeable impression on both native and
non-native listeners. But listeners may also rely on information of other prosodic
parameters (such as duration, speech rate, intensity) as well as phonation types and
formant spaces in the selection of a preferred voice, which will be investigated in
the future. The current study may shed some light on talent voice selection in a
speech synthesis system.},
isbn = {978-3-959080-92-7},
issn = {0940-6832},
keywords = {Poster},
url = {https://www.essv.de/pdf/2017_83_90.pdf},
}