A Preliminary Study on Emotions of Chinese Whispered Speech

This paper focuses on the emotional Chinese whispered speech. The auditory perception is to demonstrate that whispered speech can also carry emotional information as the voiced one do. The experiment carried on the single tonal whispered Mandarin shows that the falling-raising and falling tones could transfer feelings better than the high-level and raising ones. The accuracy of perception indicates that anger, sad and afraid are more easily to be perceived. The statistic of misperception in this test illustrates the similarity between each emotion. Apart from the perception experiment, the acoustic analysis is also conducted. The prosodic features, including short time energy and speak rate, voice quality parameter-formant, and spectrum are abstracted to analyze the differences between emotions of Chinese whispered speech. Meanwhile, the feasibility of emotional identification of whispered speech is certified.