Emotions in [a]: A perceptual and acoustic study

Abstract

The aim of this investigation is to study how well voice quality conveys emotional content that can be discriminated by human listeners and the computer. The speech data were produced by nine professional actors (four women, five men). The speakers simulated the following basic emotions in a unit consisting of a vowel extracted from running Finnish speech: neutral, sadness, joy, anger, and tenderness. The automatic discrimination was clearly more successful than human emotion recognition. Human listeners thus apparently need longer speech samples than vowel-length units for reliable emotion discrimination than the machine, which utilizes quantitative parameters effectively for short speech samples.

Perception of Emotional Valences and Activity Levels from Vowel Segments of Continuous Speech

“…This material was also used in earlier studies. 16,33,34 From the total number of 450 samples, 200 samples were randomly chosen for the analyses of the present study. It was considered that 200 samples would be the maximum in the perception test that the listeners could reasonably classify without becoming too tired.…”

“…31 Some studies have aimed to shed light on the individual role of the acoustic voice quality 7 in the expressions of emotions and their valence. 6,16,[32][33][34] The results of Laukkanen et al suggested that voice source parameters may vary independently of F0 and intensity in emotional utterances. 4 In a further study by Laukkanen et al 6 the variation in F0, intensity and duration were artificially eliminated.…”

Vocal Emotion Identification by Children Using Cochlear Implants, Relations to Voice Quality, and Musical Interests

“…Frequencies of F3 and F4 have been shown to differ between emotional expressions (Laukkanen, Vilkman, Alku & Oksanen, 1997;Waaramaa et al, 2006;Waaramaa et al, 2008;Waaramaa, Palo, & Kankare, 2014). Voice breaks, jitter, shimmer, and harmonics to noise are also shown to be related to emotional expressions (Laukkanen et al, 2008;Toivanen, Waaramaa, Alku, Laukkanen, Seppänen, Väyrynen & Airas, 2006;Waaramaa et al, 2010;Waaramaa & Leisiö, 2013).…”

Exploring the Effects of Personality Traits on the Perception of Emotions From Prosody

“…Generally, vocal perception studies tend to use professional actors to portray the emotions (e.g., Graham et al, 2001; Banziger and Scherer, 2005; Airas and Alku, 2006; Toivanen et al, 2006), based on the assumption that professional actors are better able to portray unambiguous emotions (Williams and Stevens, 1972). It has however been argued that professional actors may produce exaggerated stereotypical portrayals (e.g., Scherer, 1995; Juslin and Laukka, 2001; Paulmann et al, 2016), which may result in lack of ecological validity (Scherer, 1989).…”