Modeling and synthesis of English regional accents with pitch and duration correlates

This paper provides an introduction to the acoustic–phonetic structure of English regional accents and presents a signal processing method for the modeling and transformation of the acoustic correlates of English accents for example from British English to American English. The focus of this paper is on the modeling of intonation and duration correlates of accents as the modeling of formants is described in previous papers (Yan et al., 2007 and Vaseghi et al., 2009). The intonation correlates of accents are modeled with the statistics of a set of broad features of the pitch contour. The statistical models of phoneme durations and word speaking rates are obtained from automatic segmentation of word/phoneme boundaries of speech databases. A contribution of this paper is the use of accent synthesis for comparative evaluation of the causal effects of the acoustic correlates of accent. The differences between the acoustics–phonetic realizations of British Received Pronunciation (RP), Broad Australian (BAU) and General American (GenAm) English accents are modeled and used in an accent transformation and synthesis method for evaluation of the influence of formant, pitch and duration on conveying accents.