Rhythm of British English in Festival

Interesting how ideas rise from time to time in seemingly unrelated places. Recently I've read nice post in John Well's blog about the proper RP English rhythm and now that issue raised again in gnuspeech mailing list where Dr. Hill cited his work

JASSEM, W., HILL, D.R. & WITTEN, I.H. (1984) Isochrony in English speech: its statistical validity and linguistic relevance. Pattern, Process and Function in Discourse Phonology (collection ed. Davydd Gibbon), Berlin: de Gruyter, 203-225 (J)

I spend some time thinking about how this rhythm is handled in Festival and came to the conclusion there is no such entity there. Probably it's somehow handled by CART for duration and intonation prediction, but not as a separate entity. Though many voices are supposed to be US English, I still think they can benefit from a proper rhythm prediction. Try the example from the movie, "This the house that Jack built" with artic voices. Check if Jack gets enough stress.