ESCA/NATO Tutorial and Research Workshop on
Speech Under Stress

Lisbon, Portugal
September 14-15, 1995

Effects of Vocal F0 Manipulations on Perceived Emotional Stress

Athanassios Protopapas, Philip Lieberman

Department of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

In this study we investigated the effect of jitter and long-term Fo measures on perceived emotional stress using stimuli synthesized with the LPC coefficients of a steady vowel and varying Fo-tracks. The original Fo tracks were taken from naturally occurring speech in stressful and not stressful conditions. Stimuli with more jitter were rated as sounding more hoarse but not more stressed. Mean and maximum Fo within an utterance correlated highly (r>0.8) with stress ratings but range of Fq did not correlate significantly with the stress ratings, especially after the effect of maximum Fo was removed by stepwise regression.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Protopapas, Athanassios / Lieberman, Philip (1995): "Effects of vocal f0 manipulations on perceived emotional stress", In SUS-1995, 1-4.