fundamental frequency contour of a syllable I have an audio signal and I want to calculate the fundamental frequency contour for each syllable. In the related paper is said that only 9-time points are required. (9 values of frequency contour in each syllable).

As I saw in some papers, calculating fundamental frequency contour is equal to pitch contour.

Can someone please explain it to me what is it exactly?

Thanks in advance
Syllables might require a certain duration to be recognizable by humans.  Over part of that time, voiced syllables might have a pitch, or a clear periodicity in waveform.  Pitch can be described as having a fundamental frequency or F0 (the reciprocal of the perceived repetition period). Note that there a lots of other answers ont this Q&amp;A site on various ways to measure pitch, and the potential problems related to such.

Pitch can change over time.  If you measure pitch at several points in time (say 9 points for example) over the duration where a syllable is voiced, you might find that the measured pitch in fact has changed (or not).  With those pitch measurements over time one could interpolate a curve (spline or polynomial regression, etc.) thru those measured points.  You might end up making a bunch of different looking curves from different snippets of audio.  One could also publish nice looking graphs of those interpolated curves and call the shapes of those curves contours.

Feed a lot of those nice looking pitch/F0 frequency contours (plus a large amount of other hopefully related data) to a machine learning algorithm, and it might be able to infer some possibly interesting correlations between things.  

Or not.