Synthesizing prosody : a prominence-based approach

Abstract

A preliminary test exploring 4 emotions showed that conveying emotions by time domain synthesis may be possible. Therefore, a more sophisticated test was carried out in order to determine the influence of the prosodic parameters in the perception of a speaker's emotional state. Six different emotional states were investigated. The stimuli of the second test were used in three different testing procedures: as natural speech, resynthesized and reduced to a sawtooth signal. The recognition rates were lower than in the preliminary test, although the differences between the recognition rates of natural and synthetic speech were comparable for both tests. The outcome of the sawtooth test showed that the amount of information about a speaker's emotional state transported by F_{0}, energy and overall duration is rather small. However, we could determine relations between the acoustic prosodic parameters and the emotional content of speech.