CASL
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/22
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Item Towards ordinal classification of voice quality features with acoustic parameters(ESSV, 2019-03-09) Schaeffler, Felix; Eichner, Matthias; Beck, Janet M.The human voice is capable of fine-grained variation that results in listener attributions of various psychological, social and biological factors. The complexity of this process is reflected in the number and richness of terms that are used to describe human voices. In this paper we argue that any application that attempts a mapping of the acoustic voice signal onto voice descriptor labels would benefit from an intermediate auditory-phonetic level. As a point of departure we explore the relationships between acoustic parameters and some specific perceptual features derived from Vocal Profile Analysis (VPA), a phonetically motivated voice quality analysis scheme. Perceptual analysis of voice samples from 133 speakers was carried out using VPA for three key phonation features (creakiness, whisperiness, harshness). We extracted eleven acoustic parameters from the samples and used stepwise linear regression to identify acoustic parameters with predictive value. Samples from female speakers were used to derive regression equations which were then used to predict VPA ratings of male voices. Results show significant predictors for all three phonation features and indicate that predictions for the three phonation types rely mainly on different parameters. If a tolerance of ± 1 scalar degree for the perceptual analysis is accepted, then classification accuracy lies at or above 90% for all three phonation features.Item Acoustic impact on decoding of semantic emotion(Springer-Verlag, 2007) Eriksson, E. J.; Schaeffler, Felix; Sullivan, K. P. H.; Muller, C.This paper examines the interaction between the emotion indicated by the content of an utternance and the emotion indicated by the acoustic of an utterance, and considers whether a speaker can hide their emotional state by acting an emotion even though being semantically honest. Three female and two male speakers of Swedish were recorded saying the sentences Jag har vunnit en miljon p lotto (I have won a million on the lottery), Det Anns bcker i bokhyllan (There are books on the bookshelf) and Min mamma har just dtt (my mother just died) as if they were happy, neutral (indifferent), angry or sad. Thirty-nine experimental participants (19 female and 20 male) heard 60 randomly selected stimuli randomly coupled with the question Do you consider this speaker to be emotionally X?, where X could be angry, happy, neutral or sad. They were asked to respond yes or no; the listeners' responses and reaction times were collected. The results show that semantic cues to emotion play little role in the decoding process. Only when there are few specific acoustic cues to an emotion do semantic cues come into play. However, longer reaction times for the stimuli containing mismatched acoustic and semantic cues indicate that the semantic cues to emotion are processed even if they impact little on the perceived emotion. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.