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Puppeteering represents a traditional but slowly dying folk art in which impersonation based on modifying the puppeteer's voice belongs among the core expressive and stylistic devices. A study of the formal and functional aspects of voice quality and other prosodic features in puppeteers' production as well as their acoustic correlates is thus an integral part of studies into communicative social signals especially in emotional and expressive speech. This analysis becomes even more relevant in cases when puppeteers' performance represents a very salient communication code in a particular culture. Better understanding of such traditional code opens possibilities of applications into several speech processing domains. Our data consist of recordings of plays and excerpts by two puppeteers (a father and a son) and verbal descriptions of personality features of the characters that the actor tries to express through their voices. We propose an approach to the taxonomy of archetypal characters based on analyzing the psychological, aesthetic and acoustic-phonetic aspects of their personalities. More specifically, we identify salient links between acoustic-prosodic features on the one hand and semantic and personality features on the other hand.

Acoustics 08 Paris 2263The prosody model is one of the most important parts of every speech synthesizer, influencing mainly its naturalness. The intonation contour and durations of phonemes (together with speech quality) bear a great deal of extralinguistic and paralinguistic information contained in the synthesized speech. The features reflecting personality, mood and emotions of the speaker are in strong interaction with those reflecting speech styles. Anyway, the appropriate choice of a prosody model and training material can make it possible to create a special model for every speaking style.The paper presents our approach to modelling of acoustic parameters of prosody in two different speech styles in Slovak. Our model is based on Classification and regression trees (CARTs). It uses independent CART for phoneme duration and three CARTs for fundamental frequency (F0) at the beginning, centre, and end of each syllable. Two hours of read speech were used for training a model of read speech. The recordings of a puppet player were used to train a model of acted speech. The models were implemented in the Kempelen 2.2 unit selection Slovak speech synthesizer. The listening tests have shown that the models are capable of modeling significant amount of the differences of the two speaking styles.