Rhythmic Patterns and Literary Genres in Synthesized Speech

In this paper, the rhythmic patterns observed in natural and synthesized speech are compared for three literary forms (rhymes, poems, and fairy tales). The aim of the comparison is to evaluate how rhythm could be improved in synthesized speech, which could allow adapting it to specific styles or genres. The study is based on the analysis of a corpus of six rhymes, four poems and two extracts from fairy tales. All texts were recorded by three speakers and were generated with two distinct synthesized voices. The comparison of the rhythmic patterns observed is done by analyzing duration in relation to prosodic structure in the various data sets. This approach allows showing that rhythmic differences between synthesized and natural speech are mostly due to the marking of prosodic structure.