Contribution of Telugu vowels in identifying emotions

This work is mainly intended at identifying emotion contribution of different vowels in Telugu language. Instead of processing the entire speech signal we propose to focus only vowel parts of the utterance (/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/ and /o/). By analysing the vowels we can discriminate the emotions. In this work spectral and prosodic features are used for studying the effect of emotions on different vowels. Even though prosodic features are best discriminators of emotions at utterance level, at phoneme level spectral features are more useful. One may observe that same vowel exhibits different spectral behaviour when expressed in different emotions. Shimmer and jitter play a crucial role for classifying emotions using vowels. A semi natural database used in this work is collected from Telugu movies. Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) are used as the mathematical models for classification. Emotions considered for this work are anger, fear, happy, sad and neutral. Average emotion recognition performance obtained by combining MFCCs, formants, intensity, shimmer and jitter is around 78%.