  This paper presents a simple yet effective method to achieve prosody transfer
from a reference speech signal to synthesized speech. The main idea is to
incorporate well-known acoustic correlates of prosody such as pitch and
loudness contours of the reference speech into a modern neural text-to-speech
(TTS) synthesizer such as Tacotron2 (TC2). More specifically, a small set of
acoustic features are extracted from reference audio and then used to condition
a TC2 synthesizer. The trained model is evaluated using subjective listening
tests and a novel objective evaluation of prosody transfer is proposed.
Listening tests show that the synthesized speech is rated as highly natural and
that prosody is successfully transferred from the reference speech signal to
the synthesized signal.
