Publication

Abstract : The emotions carry crucial extra linguistic information in speech. A preliminary study on the significance and issues in processing the emotive speech anchored around the vowel-like region onset points (VLROP) is presented in this paper. The onset of each vowel-like region (VLR) in speech signals is termed as the VLROP. VLROPs are estimated by exploiting the impulse like characteristics in excitation components of speech signals. Also the work presented in the paper identifies the issue of falsified estimation of VLROPs in emotional speech. Despite the falsely estimated VLROPs, the formant based vocaltract characteristics are analyzed around the correctly estimated VLROPs from the emotional speech. The VLROPs retained for the emotion analysis are selected from those syllables which have uniquely estimated VLROPs without false detection from each emotion of same text and speaker. Based on the formant analysis performed around the VLROPs, there are significant variations in the location of the formant frequencies for the emotion utterances with respect to neutral speech utterances. This paper presents a formant frequency analysis performed from 20 syllables selected from 10 texts, 10 speakers across 4 emotions (Anger, Happy, Fear and Boredom) and neutral speech signals of German emotion speech database. The experiments presented in this paper suggest, firstly, the need for devising a new robust VLROP estimation for emotional speech. Secondly, the need for further exploring the formant characteristics for emotion speech analysis. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.