14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

Analysis and Modelling of Emotional Speech in Spanish

J. M. Montero (1), J. Gutiérrez-Arriola (1), J. Colás (1), E. Enríquez (2), J. M. Pardo (1)

(1) Grupo de Tecnología del Habla, Departamento de Ingeniería Electrónica E.T.S.I. Telecomunicación, Univ. Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
(2) Grupo de Tecnología del Habla -Departamento de Lengua Española, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Madrid, Spain

The importance of speech prosody for conveying emotional information has been extensively underlined in the literature. Major elements such as pitch, tempo and stress are presented as the main acoustic correlates of emotion in human speech. Nevertheless, as several authors have shown, voice quality is also a relevant feature in emotion recognition. In this paper, we present the prosodic analysis, modelling and evaluation of the Spanish Emotional Speech Database including four emotions: happiness, sadness, cold anger and surprise. Our results show that, for Spanish, the contribution of prosody to the recognisability of the uttered emotion greatly varies from one to another, with sadness and surprise being more supra-segmental, and happiness and cold anger being rather segmental.

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Bibliographic reference.  Montero, J. M. / Gutiérrez-Arriola, J. / Colás, J. / Enríquez, E. / Pardo, J. M. (1999): "Analysis and modelling of emotional speech in Spanish", In ICPhS-14, 957-960.