The Estonian Emotional Speech Corpus serves as the acoustic basis for emotional text-to-speech synthesis. Because the Estonian synthesizer is a TTSsynthesizer, we started off by focusing on read texts and the emotions contained in them. The corpus is built on a theoretical model and we are currently at the stage of verifying the components of the model. In the present article we give an overvie...

There is evidence from neuroimaging and clinical studies that functionally link the basal ganglia to emotional speech processes. However, in most previous studies, explicit tasks were administered. Thus, the underlying mechanisms substantiating emotional speech are not separated from possibly process-related task effects. Therefore, the current study tested emotional speech processing in an eve...

This paper presents a personal view of some the problems facing speech technologists in the study of emotional speech. It describes some databases that are currently being used, and points out that the majority of them use actors to reproduce the emotions, thereby possibly falsely representing the true characteristics of emotion in speech. Databases of real emotional speech, on the other hand, ...

The goal of this MSc project was to build unit selection voice that could portray emotions in various intensities. A suitable definition of emotion was developed along with a descriptive framework that supported the work carried out. Two speakers were recorded portraying happy and angry speaking styles, additionally a neutral database was also recorded. One voice was built for each speaker that...

Speech is a rich source of information, not only about what a speaker says, but also about what the speaker’s attitude is toward the listener and toward the topic under discussion — as well as the speaker’s own current state of mind. Until recently, most research on spoken language systems has focused on propositional content: what words is the speaker producing? Currently there is considerable...

The problem of speech modeling for generating stressed speech using a source generator framework is addressed in this paper. In general, stress in this context refers to emotional or task induced speaking conditions. Throughout this particular study, the focus will be limited to speech under angry, loud and Lombard effect (i.e., speech produced in noise) speaking conditions. Source generator th...