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

On the Relations of Semantic and Acoustic Properties of Emotions

Kai Alter (1,2), Erhard Rank (4,2), Sonja A. Kotz (1), Erdmut Pfeifer (1), Mireille Besson (3), Angela D. Friederici (1), Johannes Matiasek (2)

(1) Max-Planck-Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany
(2) Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (ÖFAI), Vienna, Austria
(3) Centre de la Recherche Nationale (CNRS), Marseille, France
(4) Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

In the present study, the relation between the semantic content and different acoustic parameters of emotional speech are analyzed. The analyzed corpus includes happiness, neutral state, and anger used as semantic content as well as emotional state of the speaker - also comprising mismatch conditions.
   We have analyzed voice source quality parameters in a subset of the acoustic signals. The data indicate that the opening quotient and the glottal opening tendentially reflect differences between anger and neutral statements. Breathiness and roughness, estimated by the harmonic-to-noice ratio (HNR) show significantly higher HNR in the sentences expressed with anger than the neutral expressions.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Alter, Kai / Rank, Erhard / Kotz, Sonja A. / Pfeifer, Erdmut / Besson, Mireille / Friederici, Angela D. / Matiasek, Johannes (1999): "On the relations of semantic and acoustic properties of emotions", In ICPhS-14, 2121-2124.