Evolving emotional prosody

by Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm and Xavier Llorà (2006).

Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (INTERSPEECH 2006), paper 1741. Also as IlliGAL TR No 2006018. Link to the PDF.

Abstract

Emotion is expressed by prosodic cues, and this study uses the active interactive Genetic Algorithm to search a wide space for sad and angry parameters of intensity, F0, and duration in perceptual resynthesis experiments with users. This method avoids large recorded databases and is flexible for exploring prosodic emotion parameters. Solutions from multiple runs are analyzed graphically and statistically. Average results indicate parameter evolution by emotion, and appear best forsad speech. Solutions are quite successfully classified by CART, with duration as main predictor.