Modelling politicians' phono-styles with TTS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2017/08/0022/000324Keywords:
intonation, phono-style, public speech, politician speech, synthesisAbstract
An oratory technique often observed in politicians consists in playing with prosodic features in order to build a particular phono-style. In a previous perceptual and acoustic analysis, I showed that Hugo Chávez (former president of Venezuela) and José Zapatero (former prime minister of Spain) have completely different phono-styles, which are easily recognizable by listeners. In this study, text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis was initially used to produce neutral utterances. The prosodic parameters of these utterances were then varied to reproduce Chávez and Zapatero’s specific phono-styles. The reproductions were tested in a series of perceptual experiments which show that the modifications made to intonation patterns are enough to identify the two politicians.
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