Intonation: Theory, Models, and Applications Athens, Greece September 18-20, 1997

Analysis of Intonation in Emotional Speech

Keikichi Hirose, Hiromichi Kawanami, Nobuyuki Ihara

Department of Information and Communication Engineering, School of Engineering, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Prosodic features were analyzed for utterances with various kinds of attitude and emotion and were compared to those of reading speech. The results clearly showed the lack of declination in fundamental frequency contours of emotional speech, which was mainly due to rather large phrase components at phrase boundaries. Although several tendencies were obtained for the prosodic features of emotional speech, they were subjected to rather large speaker to speaker variations; indicating that an attitude/emotion can be expressed in different ways and should have a wide variety in its levels and types. Perceptual experiments were also conducted using synthetic speech whose prosodic features were modified during the analysis-resynthesis process. The results showed the relative importance of speech rates, but also showed large variations depending on the speaker of the original utterances.

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Bibliographic reference.  Hirose, Keikichi / Kawanami, Hiromichi / Ihara, Nobuyuki (1997): "Analysis of intonation in emotional speech", In INT-1997, 185-188.