Acoustical Correlates of Affective Prosody

SummaryThe word “Anna” was spoken by 12 female and 11 male subjects with six different emotional expressions: “rage/hot anger,” “despair/lamentation,” “contempt/disgust,” “joyful surprise,” “voluptuous enjoyment/sensual satisfaction,” and “affection/tenderness.” In an acoustical analysis, 94 parameters were extracted from the speech samples and broken down by correlation analysis to 15 parameters entering subsequent statistical tests. The results show that each emotion can be characterized by a specific acoustic profile, differentiating that emotion significantly from all others. If aversive emotions are tested against hedonistic emotions as a group, it turns out that the best indicator of aversiveness is the ratio of peak frequency (frequency with the highest amplitude) to fundamental frequency, followed by the peak frequency, the percentage of time segments with nonharmonic structure (“noise”), frequency range within single time segments, and time of the maximum of the peak frequency within the utterance. Only the last parameter, however, codes aversiveness independent of the loudness of an utterance.