Adding the affective dimension: a new look in speech analysis and synthesis

This introduction to a special session on “Emotion in recognition and synthesis” highlights the need to understand the effects of affective speaker states on voice and speech on a psychophysiological level. It is argued that major advances in speaker verification, speech recognition, and natural-sounding speech synthesis depend on increases in our knowledge of the mechanisms underlying voice and speech production under emotional arousal or other attitudinal states, as well as on a more adequate understanding of listener decoding of affect from vocal quality. A brief review of the current state of the art is provided.