A Study of Prosodic Features of Emotional Speech

Abstract

Speech is a rich source of information which gives not only about what a speaker says, but also about what the speaker’s attitude is toward the listener and toward the topic under discussion—as well as the speaker’s own current state of mind. Recently increasing attention has been directed to the study of the emotional content of speech signals, and hence, many systems have been proposed to identify the emotional content of a spoken utterance.

The focus of this research work is to enhance man machine interface by focusing on user’s speech emotion. This paper gives the results of the basic analysis on prosodic features and also compares the prosodic features of, various types and degrees of emotional expressions in Tamil speech based on the auditory impressions between the two genders of speakers as well as listeners. The speech samples consist of “neutral” speech as well as speech with three types of emotions (“anger”, “joy”, and “sadness”) of three degrees (“light”, “medium”, and “strong”). A listening test is also being conducted using 300 speech samples uttered by students at the ages of 19 -22. The features of prosodic parameters based on the emotional speech classified according to the auditory impressions of the subjects are analyzed. Analysis results suggest that prosodic features that identify their emotions and degrees are not only speakers’ gender dependent, but also listeners’ gender dependent.