Method for Collection of Acted Speech Using Various Situation Scripts

This study was carried out to improve the quality of acted emotional speech. In the recent paradigm shift in speech collection techniques, methods for the collection of high-quality and spontaneous speech has been strongly focused on. However, such methods involve various constraints: such as the difficulty in controlling utterances and sound quality. Hence, our study daringly focuses on acted speech because of its high operability. In this paper, we propose a new method for speech collection by refining acting scripts. We compared the speech collected using our proposed method and that collected using an imitation of the legacy method that was implemented with traditional basic emotional words. The results show the advantage of our proposed method, i.e., the possibility of the generating high F0 fluctuations in acoustical expressions, which is one of the important features of the expressive speech, while ensuring that there is no decline in the naturalness and other psychological features.