Significance of Word and Syllable Level Information for Expressive Speech Processing

In general, human beings make use of expressions (emotions) through speech, facial movements and gestures for conveying the crucial information. Mostly, expressions in speech can be attributed to longer segments, i.e., suprasegmental features also known to be prosodic features. In this paper we analyze the expressions in speech using prosodic features from utterance level, word level and syllable level. The emotions considered for the analysis are anger,compassion, happy and neutral. The prosodic features used in the analysis are duration, intonation (pitch) and energy. The analysis is performed on SUSE (Speech Under Simulated Emotion) database. The results of the analysis are used for synthesizing the expressions in neutral speech. The synthesis experiments using the features from utterance level to syllable level showed that a steady improvement in the quality of speech for the desired expressions.