What makes a charismatic speaker? A computer-based acoustic-prosodic analysis of Steve Jobs tone of voice

Niebuhr, Oliver; Voße, Jana; Brem, Alexander

doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.06.059

Cited by 62 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 44 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Recent studies by Niebuhr et al [2016aNiebuhr et al [ , 2016b indicate that Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg constitute the opposite poles of those prosodic dimensions that characterize charismatic speech, with other public speakers, like Oprah Winfrey, being localized between these poles. The authors show that the prosodic features of keynote speeches of the two famous CEOs are associated with significantly different melodic configurations comprising a large range of acoustic parameters.…”

Section: Models Of Speech Melodymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These stimuli were then further manipulated by means of PSOLA pitch and duration changes in praat [Boersma 2001], and subsequent acoustic-energy changes and hesitation insertions were made using Audacity (www.audacityteam.org/). The manipulation aimed at changing the raw stimuli towards the acoustic-melodic profiles that were determined for Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg in the studies by Niebuhr et al [2016aNiebuhr et al [ , 2016b. That is, two versions were created for each automatically synthesized robot utterance, one resembling the acoustic-melodic profile of Steve Jobs, and the other resembling the acoustic-melodic profile of Mark Zuckerberg.…”

Section: Stimulus Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, Jobs' speech characteristics had a higher acoustic energy level, a larger F0 range, shorter pauses between sentences or sentence sections, fewer hesitations (i.e., filled pauses), more emphatic accents and, in general, more high-pitched accents. With one exception, these created stimulus differences correspond to the parameter differences that characterize the real Jobs and Zuckerberg in public-speaking performances [Niebuhr et al 2016a[Niebuhr et al , 2016b. The exception is tempo.…”

Section: Stimulus Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The authors do, however, not find any effect for the different speech styles. One possible explanation for these null results is that the researchers in both studies manipulated only pitch (or its main acoustic correlate F0); human persuasive (or charismatic) speakers differ in a complex bundle of melodic features, not just intonation [Niebuhr et al 2016a[Niebuhr et al , 2016b, and perception experiments based on listener ratings of manipulated and resynthesized speech stimuli showed that the impression of persuasiveness relies on multiple parameters, with pitch not even being the primary one [cf. Landgraf 2014;Berger et al 2017].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Speech Melody Matters—How Robots Profit from Using Charismatic Speech

Fischer

Niebuhr

Jensen

et al. 2019

J. Hum.-Robot Interact.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this article, we address to what extent the proverb "the sound makes the music" also applies to humanrobot interaction, and whether robots could profit from using speech characteristics similar to those used by charismatic speakers like Steve Jobs. In three empirical studies, we investigate the effects of using Steve Jobs' and Mark Zuckerberg's speech characteristics during the generation of robot speech on the robot's persuasiveness and its impressionistic evaluation. The three studies address different human-robot interaction situations, which range from online questionnaires to real-time interactions with a large service robot, yet all involve both behavioral measures and users' assessments. The results clearly show that robots can profit from using charismatic speech. 4:2 K. Fischer et al.or another. For this reason, speech melody is necessarily present in robot speech as much as in human speech.In robot speech, usually off-the-shelf speech synthesizers are used (e.g., Mary TTS, Festival, eSpeak, FreeTTS, Vocoder, HTS), which come with speech melodies that depend on the sentence structure, for instance, by placing stress on content words [cf. Taylor 2009;Dutoit 2013]. These speech synthesizers are not implemented with persuasiveness in mind, but target as many possible uses as possible: "commercially developed TTS system have emphasized coverage rather than linguistic sophistication, by concentrating their efforts on text analysis strategies" [cf. Dutoit 2013:148]. Thus, speech melody is not adapted to different purposes, and most systems do not even allow the manipulation of prosodic features, such as speech melody, duration, spectral distribution, formant dynamics, and so on. Some studies in HRI have therefore used human recorded speech [e.g., Nishio et al. 2012;Kanda et al. 2008], and several studies show that people prefer human speech over presynthesized speech [e.g., Nass and Brave 2005]. Nevertheless, in the long run, with robots becoming more flexible and situations of use becoming more varied and unpredictable, robots will have to synthesize their own speech and cannot rely on pre-recorded utterances alone.In this article, we present three studies that investigate the influence of speech melody and other prosodic features in robot speech both on users' impressionist evaluations of the respective robots and on the robots' persuasiveness. The results show that speech melody, and prosody in general, has a considerable effect on how robots are evaluated and how persuasive they may be; this finding proved to be robust in that it holds across HRI scenarios and robots. These results indicate that robot designers should pay careful attention to how robots say what they have to say if we want robots to function seamlessly in social interactions. PREVIOUS WORKPrevious work indicates that various characteristics of robot speech may play a role in humancomputer and human-robot interaction [cf. Nass and Brave 2005]. Especially whether the robot's voice is human or whether it is synthesized seems to make a cons...

show abstract

Section: Models Of Speech Melodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Stimulus Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Stimulus Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Speech Melody Matters—How Robots Profit from Using Charismatic Speech

Fischer

Niebuhr

Jensen

et al. 2019

J. Hum.-Robot Interact.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Although the concept of motivational speech has not been studied intensively so far, we observe research progress on the phonetic expression of related concepts of motivational speech, such as charismatic (Niebuhr et al 2016) and volitional speech (Skutella et al 2014). These concepts correspond with respect to the characteristics of their acoustic phonetic features, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the phonetic expression of successful motivation

Voße¹,

Wagner²

2019

ExLing 2018: Proceedings of 9th Tutorial and Research Workshop on Experimental Linguistics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The present study provides a comprehensive acoustic phonetic analysis of motivational speech by collecting, annotating and processing 50 minutes of speech data representing less and more successful degrees of motivation. The analysis shows significant differences regarding the acoustic phonetic features f 0 (median, range, variation), intensity (median, range) and speaking rate. We observe inconsistent results for the variation of intensity, pointing to the necessity of a more fine-grained analysis of this feature. This study provides first support for the existence of a specific motivational speaking style.

show abstract

Virtual Reality as a Digital Learning Tool in Entrepreneurship: How Virtual Environments Help Entrepreneurs Give More Charismatic Investor Pitches

Niebuhr¹,

Tegtmeier²

2019

Digital Entrepreneurship

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What makes a charismatic speaker? A computer-based acoustic-prosodic analysis of Steve Jobs tone of voice

Cited by 62 publications

References 44 publications

Speech Melody Matters—How Robots Profit from Using Charismatic Speech

Speech Melody Matters—How Robots Profit from Using Charismatic Speech

Investigating the phonetic expression of successful motivation

Virtual Reality as a Digital Learning Tool in Entrepreneurship: How Virtual Environments Help Entrepreneurs Give More Charismatic Investor Pitches

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About