ITRW on Speech and Emotion September 5-7, 2000 Newcastle, Northern Ireland, UK

Techniques for the phonetic description of emotional speech

Peter Roach

School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, University of Reading, UK

It is inconceivable that there could be information present in the speech signal that could be detected by the human auditory system but which is not accessible to acoustic analysis and phonetic categorisation. We know that humans can reliably recognise a range of emotions produced by speakers of their own language on the basis of the acoustic signal alone, yet it appears that our ability to identify the relevant acoustic correlates is at present rather limited. This paper proposes that we have to build a bridge between the human perceptual experience and the measurable properties of the acoustic signal by developing an analytic framework based partly on auditory analysis. A possible framework is outlined which is based on the work of the Reading/Leeds Emotional Speech Database. The project was funded by ESRC Grant no. R000235285.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Roach, Peter (2000): "Techniques for the phonetic description of emotional speech", Invited review paper, In SpeechEmotion-2000, 53-59.