Newsgroups: comp.speech
Path: pavo.csi.cam.ac.uk!warwick!pipex!uunet!munnari.oz.au!metro!mimic!andrewh
From: andrewh@mimic.ee.su.oz.au (Andrew Hunt)
Subject: Re: Intonation discrimination
Message-ID: <1993Jul11.235758.13166@ucc.su.OZ.AU>
Sender: andrewh@mimic (Andrew Hunt)
Nntp-Posting-Host: mimic.ee.su.oz.au
Organization: University of Sydney, EE Dept.
References: <1993Jul9.070302.1142@trl.oz.au> <21jv45INN7eh@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>
Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1993 23:57:58 GMT
Lines: 30

In article <21jv45INN7eh@jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu>, wliu@hns.com (Weimin Liu) writes:
> In article <1993Jul9.070302.1142@trl.oz.au> wwen@tardis.trl.OZ.AU
> (Wilson X. Wen) writes:
> >Could anyone on the net please tell me how to discriminate different
> >tones (in a 5-tone system of intonation, for example) in speech wave
> >(LPC/Cepstrum/Raw wave)?
> 
> Tones and intonation are different concepts.  Tones are about small
> phonetic elements such as syllables, whereas intonation is about
> phrases or sentences.  In tonal languages, such as Chinese, tones are
> segmental (they make a difference in the meaning).  Intonation, on the
> other hand, usually only indicates whether a sentence is a question or
> a command, etc.

There is also a theoretical framework of intonational analysis developed
by M. Halliday which uses the term "tone" to describe phrase level intonation
patterns.  For example, tone 1 is a falling tone over a word or series of
words.  The system consists of 5 primary tones, secondary tones and more, 
so it seems that Wilson is using the correct terminology within that theory.

There has not been as much done on recognising Halliday's tones as has been
done for recognising pitch accents or segmental tones (like in Mandarin).
However, one advantage of Halliday's system is that is integrated into a
more sophisticated "high-level" model than I have seen for pitch accents.
I don't have my reference list with me so I can't post specific references.

Cheers,

Andrew Hunt
<andrewh@brutus.ee.su.oz.au>
