Analysis of the glottal excitation of emotionally styled and stressed speech

The problems of automatic recognition of and synthesis of multistyle speech have become important topics of research in recent years. This paper reports an extensive investigation of the variations that occur in the glottal excitation of eleven commonly encountered speech styles. Glottal waveforms were extracted from utterances of non-nasalized vowels for two speakers for each of the eleven speaking styles. The extracted waveforms were parametrized into four duration-related and two slope-related values. Using these six parameters, the glottal waveforms from the eleven styles of speech were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The glottal waveforms from each style speech were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The glottal waveforms from each style of speech have been shown to be significantly and identifiably different from all other styles, thereby confirming the importance of the glottal waveform in conveying speech style information and in causing speech waveform variations. The degree of variation in styled glottal waveforms has been shown to be consistent when trained on one speaker and compared with another.