Exploring the prosody of affective speech

Abstract

This paper introduces a research project on voice quality and affect expression. It explores affective prosody by investigating the relationship between voice source parameter changes and perceived affect. Firstly, it aims to examine the relative contribution of voice source shifts occurring globally across an utterance and shifts that are aligned to the prosodic structure of the utterance. Secondly, it aims to formulate a simple model for affect expression that could, in principle, be applied to text-to-speech synthesis systems for Irish (Gaelic) dialects. The analytic methods to be used include voice source and intonation analysis of utterances produced to portray a range of emotions, and perception experiments with stimuli varying in terms of global vs. local, structured source manipulations.