Speech carries information not only about the lexical content, but also about the age, gender, signature and emotional state of the speaker. Speech in different emotional states is accompanied by distinct changes in the production mechanism. In this chapter, we present a review of analysis methods used for emotional speech. In particular, we focus on the issues in data collection, feature representations and development of automatic emotion recognition systems. The significance of the excitation source component of speech production in emotional states is examined in detail. The derived excitation source features are shown to carry the emotion correlates.
IntroductionHumans have evolved various forms of communication like facial expressions, gestures, body postures, speech, etc. The form of communication depends on the context of interaction, and is often accompanied by various physiological reactions such as changes in the heart rate, skin resistance, temperature, muscle activity and blood pressure. All forms of human communication carry information at two levels, the message and the underlying emotional state.Emotions are essential part of real life communication among human beings. Various descriptions of the term emotion are studied in [21,22,60,88,92,98,100]. Some of the descriptions are: (a) "Emotions are underlying states which are evolved and adaptive. Emotion expressions are produced by the communicative value of underlying states" [22].