Parameter changes across different emotions in human speech

Abstract

Voice quality is considered to play an important role for the transmission of emotions in human speech communications. In this paper, we explored the acoustical characteristics of voice quality in the emotional speech signals based on numerical parameters, such as Jitter, RAP, Shimmer, APQ, NHR and SPI. In addition, the role of pitch, pitch range and normalized speech duration of the emotional speech was focused. Korean emotional speech database was collected from a professional actor. Nine sentences having different contents were respectively uttered with six different kinds of emotions: neutral, happiness, anger, sadness, fear and boredom. Jitter, RAP, Shimmer, APQ, NHR and SPI were computed respectively after extracting the voiced segment with the vowel /a/ from each emotional sentence. Pitch, pitch range and normalized speech duration of each emotional speech signal were also measured or computed. The statistical analysis based on the changes of these nine sets of different parameters was performed to characterize voice quality of the human emotional speeches.