Investigation of the relation between acoustic features and articulation — An application to emotional speech analysis

In speech communication, humans are able to perceive not only the acoustic features but also the articulation state from speech sounds. Some specific articulation configurations can carry certain non-linguistic information such as emotion. However, the relation between articulation and acoustic features is still not clear. To clarify such a relation, we analyzed speech data from the emotions of cold anger and hot anger based on an emotional speech corpus and attempt to realize the observations using a physiological articulatory model. We measured the changes in acoustic features when altering articulation states for individual speech organs using the physiological articulatory model. It is found that the cold and hot angers both have emphasized components in high-frequency region, while the former controls articulation and the latter controls the sound source of the speech production system.