V OICE QUALITY AND F0 CUES FOR AFFECT EXPRESSION By I. Yanushevskaya, C. Gobl and N. Chasaide

O UTLINE Introduction Synthetic stimuli Experiment setup Result Conclusion

I NTRODUCTION F0 cues are crucial for emotional speech What about Voice Quality? Base on previous works: Adding voice quality cues enhance speech synthesis Several voice quality stimuli have similar result: Tense ~= Harsh Breathy ~= whisper Varying voice quality can influence listener’s judgment Want to know the effect of varying voice quality only.

S YNTHETIC STIMULI 15 synthetic stimuli: Ja adjö (Hello Goodbye) KLSYN88 as formant synthesizer 3 groups stimuli: “VQ”, “F0”, “VQ+F0”

KLSYN88

VQ ONLY STIMULI Modal, breathy, whispery, lax-creaky, tense stimuli Omit harsh, creaky included in previous work Modal: Copy the natural utterance to KLSYN88 Breathy: lower AV, higher OQ, lower SQ, higher TL, wider B1 Whispery: Aspiration noise Lax-creaky: Creaky+Breathy-Whispery Tense: lower OQ, higher SQ, lower TL, narrower B1 higher F0 NOT normalized with F0

F0 ONLY STIMULI

VQ+F0 STIMULI Are these good pairs? We’ll see….

E XPERIMENT SETUP 20 native speakers 10 of 15 stimuli presented Response a pair of opposite affective attribute sad-happy Intimate-formal Relaxed-stressed Bored-interested Apologetic-indignant Fearless-scared ANOVA

R ESULT

C ONCLUSION Showed that some voice quality is more related than other in some emotions. X Intimacy, sadness -> breathy O -> lax-creaky Voice quality is averagely better than F0 cues on speech synthesis Maybe because the voice quality already includes the information of F0

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