The analysis by synthesis of speech melody: from data to models

International audience; This paper describes the application of the analysis by synthesis paradigm to the melody of speech. A complete chain of processes is described from the acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency (f0), via the phonetic modelling of f0 using the Momel algorithm, to the surface phonological representation of the curves using the INTSINT alphabet. Each step of the chain is designed as a reversible process which can be used to generate an acoustic output allowing an objective evaluation of the analysis. Finally, the current implementation of ProZed, a prosody editor for linguists, is described. It is argued that an explicit set of modelling tools like this will allow linguists to test different models of phonological structure which, it is hoped, will result in the availability of more and better data on a wide variety of languages.