Testing Affective Correlates of Voice Quality through Analysis and Resynthesis

This paper outlines a strategy for exploring the paralinguistic signalling of emotion, mood and attitude. The focus here is on the role of voice quality and the approach adopted involves three distinct phases. The first involves detailed acoustic analyses of a range of voice qualities. The second involves the resynthesis and perceptual testing of individual voice qualities. The third stage, and the main focus of the present paper, involves the elicitation of the perceived affective colouring of voice qualities. A pilot experiment is described where listeners’ reactions to seven voice qualities were elicited in terms of eight pairs of opposing affective attributes: ratings were obtained for each pair on a seven-point scale. Results confirm that voice quality adjustments can alone evoke rather different affective colourings. Broadly, present results suggest an initial dichotomy between voice qualities that are associated with more aroused and aggressive states, and those associated with a more relaxed and unaggressive state. There is some support for traditional impressionistic observations (such as the association of creaky voice with boredom). However, results suggest some refinements on these, and suggest that there is no simple one-toone mapping between affective state and voice quality. Those affective attributes that correspond to speaker state, mood and attitude were more readily perceived for these seven voice qualities than were emotions per se.