Emotions and Speech: Some Acoustical Correlates

Abstract

This paper describes some further attempts to identify and measure those parameters in the speech signal that reflect the emotional state of a speaker. High-quality recordings were obtained of professional "method" actors reading the dialogue of a short scenario specifically written to contain various emotional situations. Excerpted portions of the recordings were subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A comparison was also made of recordings from a real-life situation, in which the emotions of a speaker were clearly defined, with recordings from an actor who simulated the same situation. Anger, fear, and sorrow situations tended to produce characteristic differences in contour of fundamental frequency, average speech spectrum, temporal characteristics, precision of articulation, and waveform regularity of successive glottal pulses. Attributes for a given emotional situation were not always consistent from one speaker to another. SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION: 9.5, 9.3. would be convenient if an indication of this state could be obtained through analysis of the acoustic characteristics of his utterances. (2) Studies of speech attributes related to emotional state may help to contribute toward a general theory of speech performance. Such a theory should have two components: one that specifies the acoustic correlates of the linguistic units used for communication between speakers of a given language, and the other that describes the extralinguistic aspects of speech communication. I. APPROACHIn planning the study, two approaches were considered: (1) a detailed analysis of "field" recordings where there would be no question as to the emotion present in the individual speaking, and (2) an analysis of high-quality recordings of professional actors simulating various emotions. The second approach was selected for the major portion of our work since it seemed to afford the best opportunity for obtaining good recordings that could be subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Because actors are presumably able to portray clear and unambiguous emotions, their utterances provide a means for exploring the basic manifestations of emotional speech. Field recordings often reflect the simultaneous presence of several emotions and the lack of control of the speech material. While an approach using actors is not novel, 4-7 investigators employing it have never performed, to our knowledge, a spectrographic analysis of the recorded speech material.Since we believed that the emotions of interest might best be described in terms of specific situations involving emotional interaction among several people, the decision was made to make use of a short play. Getting the actors involved in clearly defined situations would, hopefully, result in their experiencing and expressing the various emotions to be studied. The primary function of the play was to elicit the desired emotions from the actors and to serve as the carrier for selected phrases and sentences to be embedded in different emotional situations. These ph...

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