The article describes a database of emotional speech. Ten actors (5 female and 5 male) simulated the emotions, producing 10 German utterances (5 short and 5 longer sentences) which could be used in everyday communication and are interpretable in all applied emotions. The recordings were taken in an anechoic chamber with high-quality recording equipment. In addition to the sound electro-glottograms were recorded. The speech material comprises about 800 sentences (seven emotions * ten actors * ten sentences + some second versions). The complete database was evaluated in a perception test regarding the recognisability of emotions and their naturalness. Utterances recognised better than 80% and judged as natural by more than 60% of the listeners were phonetically labelled in a narrow transcription with special markers for voice-quality, phonatory and articulatory settings and articulatory features. The database can be accessed by the public via the internet (http://www.expressive-speech.net/emodb/).

/pdf/a-database-of-german-emotional-speech-2utsa757sb.pdf

A database of German emotional speech.

Survey on speech emotion recognition: Features, classification schemes, and databases

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/papers/Scherer03.pdf

Vocal communication of emotion: a review of research paradigms

Many authors have speculated about a close relationship between vocal expression of emotions and musical expression of emotions. but evidence bearing on this relationship has unfortunately been lacking. This review of 104 studies of vocal expression and 41 studies of music performance reveals similarities between the 2 channels concerning (a) the accuracy with which discrete emotions were communicated to listeners and (b) the emotion-specific patterns of acoustic cues used to communicate each emotion. The patterns are generally consistent with K. R. Scherer's (1986) theoretical predictions. The results can explain why music is perceived as expressive of emotion, and they are consistent with an evolutionary perspective on vocal expression of emotions. Discussion focuses on theoretical accounts and directions for future research.

/pdf/communication-of-emotions-in-vocal-expression-and-music-2to7fzkqnc.pdf

Communication of emotions in vocal expression and music performance: different channels, same code?

Work on voice sciences over recent decades has led to a proliferation of acoustic parameters that are used quite selectively and are not always extracted in a similar fashion. With many independent teams working in different research areas, shared standards become an essential safeguard to ensure compliance with state-of-the-art methods allowing appropriate comparison of results across studies and potential integration and combination of extraction and recognition systems. In this paper we propose a basic standard acoustic parameter set for various areas of automatic voice analysis, such as paralinguistic or clinical speech analysis. In contrast to a large brute-force parameter set, we present a minimalistic set of voice parameters here. These were selected based on a) their potential to index affective physiological changes in voice production, b) their proven value in former studies as well as their automatic extractability, and c) their theoretical significance. The set is intended to provide a common baseline for evaluation of future research and eliminate differences caused by varying parameter sets or even different implementations of the same parameters. Our implementation is publicly available with the openSMILE toolkit. Comparative evaluations of the proposed feature set and large baseline feature sets of INTERSPEECH challenges show a high performance of the proposed set in relation to its size.

/pdf/the-geneva-minimalistic-acoustic-parameter-set-gemaps-for-36spb4mksx.pdf

The Geneva Minimalistic Acoustic Parameter Set (GeMAPS) for Voice Research and Affective Computing

This paper explores the perceptual relevance of acoustical correlates of emotional speech by means of speech synthesis. Besides, the research aims at the development of emotion-rules which enable an optimized speech synthesis system to generate emotional speech. Two invesigations using this synthetizer are described : 1) the systematic variation of selected acoustical features to gain a preliminary impression regarding the importance of certain acoustical features for emotional expression, and 2) the specific manipulation of a stimulus spoken under emotionally neutral condition to investigate further the effect of certain features and the overall ability of the synthetizer to generate recognizable emotional expression. It is shown that this approach is indeed capable of generating emotional speech that is recognized almost as well as utterances realized by actors

/pdf/verification-of-acoustical-correlates-of-emotional-speech-fbqrb2urxj.pdf

Verification of acoustical correlates of emotional speech using formant-synthesis

In the present study, the vocal expressions of the emotions anger, hapiness, fear, boredom and sadness are acoustically analyzed in relation to neutral speech The emotional speech material produced by actors is investigated especially with regard to spectral and segmental changes which are caused by different articulatory behavior accompanying emotional arousal The findings are interpreted in relation to temporal variations

/pdf/acoustical-analysis-of-spectral-and-temporal-changes-in-abdscpguzd.pdf

Acoustical analysis of spectral and temporal changes in emotional speech

Emotions influence a person’s way of speaking, and it is possible to identify the emotional state of a speaker by merely listening to spoken utterances. The purpose of this study is to distinguish between basic emotions by prosodic features, in particular by characteristics of the fundamental frequency (F0). In addition to the measurement of global features (e.g. average F0 or frequency range) a number of more detailed features are examined. These parameters among others are the direction and steepness of F0 changes on syllable level and the F0 contour over whole utterances after a stylization procedure. Furthermore, the intrasyllabic F0 contour without stylization is investigated. The majority of the results can be used to distinguish between the emotions fear, anger, happiness, sadness, boredom, and disgust.

/pdf/f0-contours-in-emotional-speech-z954lonerd.pdf

F0-contours in emotional speech

This paper presents the results of open quotient (OQ) measurements in electroglottographic (EGG) signals of young (18–30 years) and elderly (60–82 years) male and female speakers. The paper further presents quantitative results of the relation between the EGG OQ and the perception of a speaker's age.Higgins and Saxman found a decreased EGG OQ with increased age for females, while the EGG OQ increased for males as the speaker's age increased in sustained vowel material . Although laryngeal degeneration due to increased age seems to occur to a lesser extent in females, the significant decrease of the OQ in elderly female voices could not be explained in terms of age-related physiological changes. Linville found increased spectral amplitudes in the region of F0 for the elderly (obtained by long-term average spectra (LTAS) measurements of read speech material), independent of gender, which could be indirectly interpreted as an increasing OQ . We measured the EGG OQ, not only for sustained vowels but also in v...

Walter F. Sendlmeier

Papers

A database of German emotional speech.

Verification of acoustical correlates of emotional speech using formant-synthesis

Acoustical analysis of spectral and temporal changes in emotional speech

F0-contours in emotional speech

EGG open quotient in aging voices—changes with increasing chronological age and its perception