EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Evaluation of the Affect of Speech Intonation Using a Model of the Perception of Interval Dissonance and Harmonic Tension

Norman D. Cook, Takeshi Fujisawa, Kazuaki Takami

Kansai University, Japan

We report the application of a psychophysical model of pitch perception to the analysis of speech intonation. The model was designed to reproduce the empirical findings on the perception of musical phenomena (the dissonance/consonance of intervals and the tension/sonority of chords), but does not depend on specific musical scales or tuning systems. Application to intonation allows us to calculate the total dissonance and tension among the pitches in the speech utterance. In an experiment using the 144 utterances of 18 male and female subjects, we found greater dissonance and harmonic tension in sentences with negative affect, in comparison with sentences with positive affect.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Cook, Norman D. / Fujisawa, Takeshi / Takami, Kazuaki (2003): "Evaluation of the affect of speech intonation using a model of the perception of interval dissonance and harmonic tension", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 105-108.