Recent perception experiments confirm that listeners are clearly able to distinguish between professional speaking styles, even when semantic content is removed by low-pass filtering the original speech signal. The objective of this study is to evaluate whether acoustic metrics that characterize the overall fundamental frequency contour also vary significantly according to speaking style. The analysis is based on a corpus of Brazilian Portuguese speech representing TV news broadcasters, politicians, religious leaders, and interview subjects on a TV talk show. Of the metrics proposed in the literature and evaluated here, statistical analysis shows that only the mean fundamental frequency and the percentage of dynamic tones exhibit statistically significant differences across speaking styles.
Index Terms: fundamental frequency, prosody, speaking style, professional voice
Cite as: Castro, L., Serridge, B., Moraes, J.A.d., Freitas, M. (2010) Characterizing variation in fundamental frequency contours of professional speaking styles. Proc. Speech Prosody 2010, paper 440
@inproceedings{castro10_speechprosody,
author={Luciana Castro and Ben Serridge and João Antônio de Moraes and Myrian Freitas},
title={{Characterizing variation in fundamental frequency contours of professional speaking styles}},
year=2010,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2010},
pages={paper 440}
}