Perception of the proximal voice features for emotional speech
Sona A. Patel, Tanja Banzigar, Klaus R. Scherer · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2011
The expression of emotions results in a number of changes to the acoustic signal. Considering that prosodic events may be encoded into the speech signal using multiple acoustic features, many acoustic variations may be redundant for listeners. An understanding of the acoustic changes that listeners can reliably use to differentiate emotional speech will help in the modeling emotions, for example, from a Brunswikian perspective. In the Brunswikian model of emotion communication, the acoustic features are represented as “distal cues” and the subjective perception of these changes are represented as “proximal percepts.” Few attempts have been made to understand the proximal percepts of emotional speech in relation to the acoustic properties they represent. In this study, 19 listeners were asked to rate a set of 160 samples (2 sentences expressed in 8 emotions by 10 speakers) using 12 visual-analog scales (8 prosodic scales and 4 emotion dimensions). Results showed high reliability for all scales except roughness, articulation, and intonation. The emotions were especially differentiated on the dimensions of loudness, sharpness, and speech rate. Regression analysis was used to determine the underlying acoustic cues represented by these scales. The results of this analysis will be discussed.