INTSINT is an acronym for INternational Transcription System for INTonation.
It was originally developed by Daniel Hirst in his 1987 thesis as a prosodic equivalent of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the INTSINT alphabet was subsequently used in Hirst & Di Cristo (eds) 1998 in just over half of the chapters.
INTSINT codes the intonation of an utterance by means of an alphabet of 8 discrete symbols constituting a surface phonological representation of the intonation: These tonal symbols are considered phonological in that they represent discrete categories and surface since each tonal symbol corresponds to a directly observable property of the speech signal.
The following is an example of a transcription using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) of a possible reading of the sentence "It's time to go : This corresponds to a Mid tone aligned with the middle of the syllable "It's" then a Top tone aligned with the middle of the unit "time to" and then a Downstepped tone aligned early in the syllable "go" and a Bottom tone aligned with the end of the same syllable.
The targets T, M and B are defined 'absolutely' without regard to the preceding targets Other targets are defined with respect to the preceding target: A sequence of tonal targets such as: assuming values for a female speaker of key as 240 Hz and range as 1 octave, would be converted to the following F0 targets: An interesting consequence of this model is that it automatically introduces an asymptotic lowering of sequences such as H L H... such as has often been described both for languages with lexical tone and for languages where tone is only introduced by the intonation system, without the need to introduce a specific downdrift or declination component.