Prosodic Parameters in Emotional Speech

Importance of speech prosody is on the increase as spontaneous interaction between human and machines is asked for. This paper examines how prosody contributes emotions to speech. Major elements which determine the emotion are pitch, tempo, and stress of speech. The last two elements correspond to duration and power of syllables, respectively. We choose five emotions to be tested; anger, surprise, sorrow, hate, and joy. To verify our analysis, we have implemented a speech synthesis module which can easily control prosodic parameters of output speech. Responses to the synthesized speech show that the parameters of anger, sorrow and hate are confirmed over 85 %. Experiment results also suggest that surprise and joy feelings tend to depend less on its prosody.