Emotions and Speech: Some Acoustical Correlates

TLDR

The study aims to identify and measure speech signal parameters that reflect a speaker’s emotional state. The authors recorded professional actors performing scripted emotional dialogues and analyzed the recordings quantitatively and qualitatively, also comparing them to a real‑life scenario with clearly defined emotions. Anger, fear, and sorrow produce distinct changes in fundamental frequency contour, spectral shape, timing, articulation precision, and glottal pulse regularity, though these attributes vary between speakers.

Abstract

This paper describes some further attempts to identify and measure those parameters in the speech signal that reflect the emotional state of a speaker. High-quality recordings were obtained of professional “method” actors reading the dialogue of a short scenario specifically written to contain various emotional situations. Excerpted portions of the recordings were subjected to both quantitative and qualitative analyses. A comparison was also made of recordings from a real-life situation, in which the emotions of a speaker were clearly defined, with recordings from an actor who simulated the same situation. Anger, fear, and sorrow situations tended to produce characteristic differences in contour of fundamental frequency, average speech spectrum, temporal characteristics, precision of articulation, and waveform regularity of successive glottal pulses. Attributes for a given emotional situation were not always consistent from one speaker to another.