Work on voice sciences over recent decades has led to a proliferation of acoustic parameters that are used quite selectively and are not always extracted in a similar fashion. With many independent teams working in different research areas, shared standards become an essential safeguard to ensure compliance with state-of-the-art methods allowing appropriate comparison of results across studies and potential integration and combination of extraction and recognition systems. In this paper we propose a basic standard acoustic parameter set for various areas of automatic voice analysis, such as paralinguistic or clinical speech analysis. In contrast to a large brute-force parameter set, we present a minimalistic set of voice parameters here. These were selected based on a) their potential to index affective physiological changes in voice production, b) their proven value in former studies as well as their automatic extractability, and c) their theoretical significance. The set is intended to provide a common baseline for evaluation of future research and eliminate differences caused by varying parameter sets or even different implementations of the same parameters. Our implementation is publicly available with the openSMILE toolkit. Comparative evaluations of the proposed feature set and large baseline feature sets of INTERSPEECH challenges show a high performance of the proposed set in relation to its size.

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Paralinguistic analysis is increasingly turning into a mainstream topic in speech and language processing. This article aims to provide a broad overview of the constantly growing field by defining the field, introducing typical applications, presenting exemplary resources, and sharing a unified view of the chain of processing. It then presents the first broader Paralinguistic Challenge organised at INTERSPEECH 2010 by the authors including a historical overview of the Challenge tasks of recognising age, gender, and affect, a summary of methods used by the participants, and their results. In addition, we present the new benchmark obtained by fusion of participants' predictions and conclude by discussing ten recent and emerging trends in the analysis of paralinguistics in speech and language.