Generation of emotional speech by prosody imposition on sentence, word and syllable level fragments of neutral speech

In emotional-speech, it is observed that some words and phrases are spoken prominently, compared to neutral-speech. The prominence of these specific words and phrases are reflected in the form of prosodic features such as duration, intonation and intensity patterns of the words or phrases. The neutral speech and emotional speech have basic difference due to prosody aspects of speech. Three acoustic aspects of prosodic features were examined: the pitch contour, durations, and the intensity contour. These prosodic features from Hindi emotional-speech are imposed on Hindi neutral-speech at three different levels; sentence, word and syllable levels. The pitch contour, durations, and the intensity contour were imposed on neutral-speech using Praat tool with the help of Praat script. Subjective result indicates that syllable level fragments are good choice than word or sentence level fragments for generating emotional speech from neutral speech.