Emotional speech is produced when a speaker is in a state different from normal state. The objective of this study is to explore the deviations in the excitation source features of an emotional speech compared to normal speech. The features used for analysis are extracted at subsegmental level (1-3 ms) of speech. A comparative study of these features across different emotions indicates that the...

This paper describes a technique for modeling and controlling emotional expressivity of speech in HMM-based speech synthesis. A problem of conventional emotional speech synthesis based on HMM is that the intensity of an emotional expression appearing in synthetic speech completely depends on the database used for model training. To take into account the emotional expressivity that listeners act...

The paper analyzes the prosody features, which includes the intonation, speaking rate, intensity, based on classified emotional speech. As an important feature of voice quality, voice source are also deduced for analysis. With the analysis results above, the paper creates both a CART model and a weight decay neural network model to find acoustic importance towards the emotional speech classific...

This paper investigates some non-F0 cues to emotional speech. Two speech samples were collected from spontaneous speech: the word “leave”--one sample spoken with emotion (sad) and the other, as not-emotional. Using the morphing algorithm of STRAIGHT [1], we morphed a series of 12 utterances, starting from the non-emotional “leave” to the emotional “leave”, keeping F0 at 300 Hz. Perception test ...

As a part of the IST project Interface ("Multimodal Analysis/Synthesis System for Human Interaction to Virtual and Augmented environments"), an emotional speech database for Slovenian, English, Spanish, and French language has been recorded. The database is designed for general study of emotional speech as well as analysis of emotion characteristics for speech synthesis and for automatic emotio...

Cognitive goals – i.e. the intention to utter a sentence and to produce co-speech facial and hand-arm gestures – as well as the sensorimotor realization of the intended speech, co-speech facial, and co-speech hand-arm actions are modulated by the emotional state of the speaker. In this review paper it will be illustrated how cognitive goals and sensorimotor speech, co-speech facial, and co-spee...

Emotion recognition, a key step of affective computing, is the process of decoding an embedded emotional message from human communication signals, e.g. visual, audio, and/or other physiological cues. It is well-known that speech is the main channel for human communication and thus vital in the signalling of emotion and semantic cues for the correct interpretation of contexts. In the verbal chan...

We have applied two state-of-the-art speech synthesis techniques (unit selection and HMM-based synthesis) to the synthesis of emotional speech. A series of carefully designed perceptual tests to evaluate speech quality, emotion identification rates and emotional strength were used for the six emotions which we recorded – happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust. For the HMM-based meth...