ProsoReport: an automatic tool for prosodic description. Application to a radio style

Goldman, Jean-Philippe [UCL] Auchlin, Antoine [] Avanzi, Mathieu [] Simon, Anne-Catherine [UCL]

The paper has two goals: to present a toolbox for prosodic and phonostylistic description, and to use it for studying a specific radio style. This tool is quasi-automatic and modular. It consists of a set of Praat-based scripts like phonetic segmentation, melodic stylisation and prominence detection. It produces a phonostylistic report – called ProsoReport – on the basis of an audio file and optionally an orthographic transcript. The tool is used here to identify phonostylistic properties of French public radio France Info features (hence FIF; chroniques radiophoniques): three two-minute-long recordings are compared with a plain neutral reading of the same texts. Results confirm our initial hypotheses about FIF phonostylistic distinctive characteristics – leaving questions open to further study.