The primary focus of this paper is to examine the way the emotional categories of “happiness” and “sadness” are expressed vocally in the reading aloud of prose. In particular, the two semantic categories were analysed in terms of the pitch level and the pitch variability on a corpus based on 28 works written by Charles Dickens. passages with the intended emotional colouring were selected and the fragments found in the corresponding audiobooks. They were then analysed acoustically in terms of the mean F0 and the standard deviation of F0. The results for individual emotional passages were compared with a particular reader’s mean pitch and standard deviation of pitch. The differences obtained in this way supported the initial assumptions that the pitch level and its standard deviation would raise in “happy” extracts but lower in “sad” ones. Nevertheless, not all of these tendencies could be statistically validated and additional examples taken from a selection of random novels by other nineteenth century writers were added. The statistical analysis of the larger samples confirmed the assumed tendencies but also indicated that the two semantic domains may utilise the acoustic parameters under discussion to varying degrees. While “happiness” tends to be signalled primarily by raising F0, “sadness” is communicated mostly by lowering the variability of F0. Changes in the variability of F0 seem to be of less importance in the former case, and shifts in the F0 level less significant in the latter.

The speaker’s gender is a crucial factor affecting the acoustic features of the voice. One such feature is voice intensity, also known as sound pressure level (SPL). Previous studies have indicated that the female voice may involve lower values of SPL than the male voice. Moreover, there are suggestions that the variability of voice intensity tends to be lower for women than for men as well. The major aim of this paper is to examine the effects of literary character’s gender on the reader’s SPL, measured in decibels (dB), and the variability of voice intensity, measured as the standard deviation (SD) of SPL, while reading prose aloud. The secondary aims are to investigate the general shifts of SPL and SD of SPL in dialogues independently of other variables and to consider the possible effects of the reader’s gender and the reader’s dialect. In order to accomplish these tasks, a representative sample of dialogue excerpts with male and female characters was used. Each fragment was located in the corresponding audiobook and analysed in terms of the two acoustic features under discussion. Typical values of SPL and the SD of SPL for different readers were measured in the entire chapters from which fragments were selected and the results were compared with those obtained from the extracts. In this way, it was possible to establish the relative shifts of SPL and the SD of SPL for each of the analysed fragments. Contrary to what had been expected, a statistical analysis of the results revealed no effects of the character’s gender on any of the response variables. However, conclusions concerning secondary aims were more definitive. A general trend to decrease the SD of SPL in dialogues in comparison to the rest of the text in a novel was observed. This tendency is independent of any of the factors included in the study. It was also observed that male American readers tend to lower their voice intensity when reading dialogues. All these findings may be applied in developing text to speech software.

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