Modelling microprosodic effects can lead to an audible improvement in articulatory synthesis.

When pitch is explicitly modelled for parametric speech synthesis, microprosodic variations of the fundamental frequency f are usually disregarded by current intonation models. While there are numerous studies dealing with the nature and the origin of microprosody, little research has been done on its audibility and its effect on the naturalness of synthetic speech. In this work, the influence of obstruent-related microprosodic variations on the perceived naturalness of articulatory speech synthesis was studied.