ABSTRACT
Most studies of voice pitch have been concerned with short term features of pitch movement within sentences, and their role in intonation and stress. Any long term pitch distribution will reflect at least three different sources of pitch variation: contraints imposed by the speaker's vocal anatomy; any habitual intonational patterning which is characteristic of an individual or group accent; and situational and discourse variables which are expressed in intonational structure and choice of pitch range. This chapter explores the extent to which the third source of pitch variation can be identified by the use of statistical techniques. The pitch measurements for each subject were made on a micro-computer based installation which was designed and built for the purpose. A single histogram can be used to characterise the pitch distribution in a sample of speech of any length and is thus a powerful summarising technique. The main information loss concerns the temporal organisation of individual pitch periods.
