Paradigmatic variation of vowels in expressive speech: Acoustic description and dimensional analysis

The Sound of Emotional Prosody: Nearly 3 Decades of Research and Future Directions

Emotional voices attract considerable attention. A search on any browser using "emotional prosody" as a key phrase leads to more than a million entries. Such interest is evident in the scientific literature as well; readers are reminded in the introductory paragraphs of countless articles of the great importance of prosody and that listeners easily infer the emotional state of speakers through acoustic information. However, despite decades of research on this topic and important achievements, the mapping between acoustics and emotional states is still unclear. In this article, we chart the rich literature on emotional prosody for both newcomers to the field and researchers seeking updates. We also summarize problems revealed by a sample of the literature of the last decades and propose concrete research directions for addressing them, ultimately to satisfy the need for more mechanistic knowledge of emotional prosody.

Quantifying vocal effort from the shape of the one-third octave long-term-average spectrum of speech

Vocal effort is a major source of variability in speech processing. The present study examines its spectral effects from calibrated data recorded in 1977. The 97 talkers were instructed to vary their vocal effort in five degrees. Each sequence was represented by its sound level and its 1/3 octave long-term-average spectrum. After normalization to a common arbitrary level, comparing each spectrum to the others demonstrated that the original sound level could be recovered within a 5 dB error margin. A principal component analysis brought out several spectral features involved in the quantitative relationship between spectral shape and sound level.