Investigation of Features Representing Temporal Variation of Prosody in Emotional Speech

Abstract

We propose a set of features that can describe the degree of variation in the prosody of voice pitch, speed, and timbre for pairs of neutral and emotional speech with the same utterance content. These features can be measured in time series and can also be used as features for the entire utterance when averaged over the entire utterance. Regression analysis of these three features and the results of emotional voice intensity ratings showed that each feature is valid for expressing the intensity of prosody. Some examples of time series analysis of prosody using these features are also shown.