Prosody

Prosody is the melody of speech — pitch movement, rhythm, stress and pauses — carrying meaning beyond the words themselves.

Prosody distinguishes questions from statements and sarcasm from sincerity. It is what modern TTS competes on, and its absence from plain transcripts is why verbatim text can misrepresent tone.

Related terms

Fundamental frequency (F0)Fundamental frequency (F0) is the rate of vocal-fold vibration — perceived as the pitch of a voice, typically … Text-to-speech (TTS)Text-to-speech synthesizes spoken audio from written text — the inverse of speech recognition — with modern ne…