Analyses of fundamental frequency contours for Japanese utterances that express several degrees of four emotions—joy, sadness, anger, and fear

Abstract

To give synthetic speech richer expression, prosodic features of utterances with various kinds of emotions were analyzed. Utterances that express four basic emotions with several degrees were collected as speech material: joy, sadness, anger, and fear. The fundamental frequency contours are analyzed based on a model for the process of generation. Changes in controlling parameters of the model were examined with regard to degrees of emotion. The baseline frequency increases as degrees of emotion increase. Especially for sadness and anger, its tendency is remarkable. Regarding phrase commands, the rate of occurrence increases as the respective degrees of emotion increase. The rates are affected by the kind of branch boundary in the grammatical structure and the number of morae from the immediately preceding phrase command. The change of the amplitude of phrase commands depends on the kind of position of grammatical structure. For the accent commands, timings of their onsets and offsets are almost constant f...