Acoustical Manifestations of Emotional Speech

High-quality tape recordings were obtained of professional method actors reading the dialogue of a short scenario especially written for determining those parameters in the speech signal that reflect a speaker's emotions. Excerpts from the recordings were subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Several acoustical manifestations were noted for the various emotions portrayed by the actors. Some of these acoustical correlates are measurable quantities that are amenable to extraction from the speech signal by automatic means; others represent characteristics of patterns that can be observed and categorized by visual examination of sound spectrograms. Some of the quantitative results found support the results of previous studies. Other findings, particularly those describing qualitative effects observed on spectrographic patterns, have not been reported previously.