Skip to main content

Voice Quality of European Portuguese Emotional Speech

  • Conference paper
Book cover Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language (PROPOR 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6001))

Abstract

In this paper we investigate parameters related to voice quality in European Portuguese (EP) emotional speech. Our main objectives were to obtain, to our knowledge for the first time, values for the parameters commonly contemplated in acoustic analyses of emotional speech and investigate if there is any difference for EP relative to the results obtained for other languages. A small corpus contemplating five emotions (joy, sadness, despair, fear, cold anger) and neutral speech produced by a professional actor was used. Parameters investigated include fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer and Harmonic Noise Ratio. In general, results were in accordance with the consulted literature regarding F0 and HNR. For jitter and shimmer our results were, in certain aspects, similar to the ones reported in a study of emotional speech for Spanish, another Latin language. From our analyses, and taking into consideration the reduced size of our corpus and the use of an actor as informant, no clear EP characteristic emerged, except for a possible, needing confirmation, difference regarding joy, with values similar to neutral speech.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Darwin, C.: The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Portuguese translation by Relógio D’ Água (2000) (1872)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Banse, R., Scherer, K.R.: Acoustic profiles in vocal emotion expression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(3), 614–636 (1996)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Schirmer, A., Kotz, S.A.: Beyond the right hemisphere: brain mechanisms mediating vocal emotional processing. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 10(1) (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Johnstone, T., Scherer, K.R.: The effects of emotion on voice quality. In: International Congress on Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), San Francisco (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Zovato, E., Pacchiotti, A., Quazza, S., Sandri, S.: Towards emotional speech synthesis: A rule based approach. In: ISCA SSW (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Toivanen, J., Waaramaa, T., Alku, P., Laukkanen, A.M., Seppänen, T., Väyrynen, E., Airas, M.: Emotions in [a]: a perceptual and acoustic study. Logoped Phoniatr Vocol 31(1), 43–48 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Drioli, C., Tisato, G., Cosi, P., Tesser, F.: Emotions and voice quality: Experiments with sinusoidal modeling. In: VOQUAL (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Chung, S.J.: Expression and Perception of emotion extracted from the Spontaneous Speech in Korean and in English. PhD thesis, Sorbonne Nouvelle University (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Zinken, J., Knoll, M.A., Panksepp, J.: Universality and diversity in the vocalisation of emotion. In: Isdebski, K. (ed.) Emotions of the human voice. San Diego Plural Publishing (in press)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Scherer, K.R.: Vocal communication of emotion: A review of research paradigms. Speech Communication 40, 227–256 (2003)

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  11. Cabral, J.: Transforming Prosody and Voice Quality to Generate Emotions in Speech. Dissertação de mestrado, IST/UTL (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Cabral, J., Oliveira, L.C.: EmoVoice: a system to generate emotions in speech. In: InterSpeech, pp. 1798–1801 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Rodrigues, A.: As Emoçães na Fala (Emotions in Speech). Masters dissertation, Universidade de Aveiro, PT (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Boersma, P.: Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5(9/10), 341–345 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Cowie, E.D., Cowie, R., Schroeder, M.: The description of naturally occurring emotional speech. In: ICPhS, pp. 2877–2880 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Airas, M., Alku, P.: Emotions in short vowel segments: Effects of the glottal flow as reflected by the normalized amplitude quotient. In: André, E., Dybkjær, L., Minker, W., Heisterkamp, P. (eds.) ADS 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3068, pp. 13–24. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Monzo, C., Alías, F., Ignasi, I., Gonzalvo, X., Planet, S.: Discriminating expressive speech styles by voice quality parameterization. In: XVIth International Conference on Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), pp. 2081–2084 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Nunes, A.M.B., Roussel, N., Rodrigues, A., Coimbra, R.L., Teixeira, A.: Cross-linguistic effects on the perception of emotions. In: ICPLA (2008)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Nunes, A., Coimbra, R.L., Teixeira, A. (2010). Voice Quality of European Portuguese Emotional Speech. In: Pardo, T.A.S., Branco, A., Klautau, A., Vieira, R., de Lima, V.L.S. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6001. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12320-7_19

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12320-7_19

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12319-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12320-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics