CONF Gerazov_SPECOM_2016/IDIAP An agonist-antagonist pitch production model Gerazov, Branislav Garner, Philip N. EXTERNAL http://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/papers/2016/Gerazov_SPECOM_2016.pdf PUBLIC Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: 18th International Conference, SPECOM 2016 Budapest, Hungary 9811 84--91 2016 Prosody is a phenomenon that is crucial for numerous fields of speech research, accenting the importance of having a robust prosody model. A class of intonation models based on the physiology of pitch pro- duction are especially attractive for their inherent multilingual support. These models rely on an accurate model of muscle activation. Tradi- tionally they have used the 2nd order spring-damper-mass (SDM) mus- cle model. However, recent research has shown that the SDM model is not sufficient for adequate modelling of the muscle dynamics. The 3rd order Hill type model offers a more accurate representation of mus- cle dynamics, but it has been shown to be underdamped when using physiologically plausible muscle parameters. In this paper we propose an agonist-antagonist pitch production (A2P2) model that both validates and gives insight behind the improved results of using higher-order crit- ically damped system models in intonation modelling.