Phonetic Analysis of Emotional Speech

Humans express their emotions in different ways, one of which is speech. In the phonetic expression of emotions, prosody plays a key role: its phonetic correlates (melody, pauses, duration and amplitude of sounds) are significantly altered in emotional speech. The expression of emotions through speech has been the subject of intensive research for some years, especially in the field of Psychology, but also in the field of Engineering and, to a lesser extent, in Phonetics.

Participation in the I3Media project marked the beginning of this line of research, and has continued in subsequent studies. The published results focus on the role of different melodic correlates (pitch and pitch range, intonation patterns) in the expression of emotions in Spanish (Garrido 2011, Garrido et al. 2012).