ToBI is a system of prosodic labeling that attempts to capture certain of the prosodic events in a spoken utterance. These prosodic events fall into two categories: 1) events that mark syllables as more salient or more prominent than neighboring syllables by reason of their intonation and 2) events that mark phrasing or grouping within sequences of words.

For example, in the utterance shown in Chapter 1.0 and repeated below, <armani10.wav>, the words Armani, knew and millionaire are more prominent than the. Moreover, within the multi-syllable word Armani, -man- is more prominent than Ar- or -ni. (What is your intuition about the relative prominence of mill-, -io- and -naire?) The sentence is also produced as two intonational phrases. The first word, Armani, is not grouped with the remaining words in the utterance, knew the millionaire.

Play armani10.wav: - download armani10.TextGrid

The acoustic correlates that mark these prominences and groupings are typically the f0 pattern (related to the perceived tonal pattern) and the relative duration; the contributions of other cues such as amplitude (related to perceived loudness), voice quality, strength of articulation etc. are live topics of research and discussion. The Tone tier captures information about both phrasing and prominence, while the Break Index tier captures primarily grouping information. In the following sections of this introductory tutorial, elements from both of these tiers will be gradually introduced using example that you can listen to and view labels for.

The first examples shown are intentionally chosen as straightforward and context independent, to serve as clear illustrations of individual prosodic elements. As the tutorial progresses, more complexity will be introduced since difficulties arise in labeling when more elements are present to interact. Unfortunately, isolated examples heard out of context are missing substantial amounts of important information that can help the listener to parse (interpret) the cues in the acoustic signal in relationship to ToBI labels; later sections will provide context.