A Note on Testing the Recognition of Emotional States and Tones in Speech

We report on a web-based tool for assessing the interpretation degree of the common listeners of the SRoL emotional speech and, separately, tone database for short sentences, in the Romanian language. We designed the tool for allowing us a statistical characterization of the interpretation degree of common, anonymous listeners of the emotional state and tone that characterize the recorded utterances. The intended emotional contents of the sentences fall into one of the categories: neutral (relaxed, no emotion expressed), joy, anger and sadness. The intended tones are neutral (relaxed tone), exclamatory, and interrogative. Pre-recorded spoken sentences are used. The main question addressed refers to the reliability of emotion and tonality communication, based only on speech fragments, in the Romanian language. The results show that the tonality and the emotional states are communicated with variable degrees of success; the accuracy was between 51% and 62.30% for emotional states and between 77.29% and 87.70% for tones.