We present two studies on authentic vocal affect expressions. In Study 1, the speech of social phobics was recorded in an anxiogenic public speaking task both before and after treatment. In Study 2, the speech material was collected from real life human-computer interactions. All speech samples were acoustically analyzed and subjected to listening tests. Results from Study 1 showed that a decre...

Since several years, many studies have focused on the objective measurement-analysis for dysphonic voice assessment, proposed as an alternative to the perceptual evaluation [5] that is extensively used by clinicians. In most cases, these studies describe classification systems, based on acoustic, physiological and/or aerodynamic parameters, in order to improve the performance and to help clinic...

Aim: Effects of rhinoplasty were already studied from many points of view: otherwise poor is scientific production focused on changes of voice after rhinoplasty. This preliminary study analyzed objectively and subjectively these potential effects on 19 patients who underwent exclusively closed rhinoplasty. Methods: This preliminary evaluation was conducted from September 2012 to May 2013 and 19...

PURPOSE To examine the voice and personality characteristics of patients diagnosed with organic dysphonia secondary to vocal fold immobility. METHODS The study comprised patients of both genders, attending the Clinic School of Speech Therapy of the Federal University of Paraíba, with otorhinolaryngological diagnosis of vocal fold immobility and speech therapy diagnosis of dysphonia. The self-...

UNLABELLED The modern theory of hoarseness is that there are multifactorial etiologies contributing to the voice problem. The hypothesis of this study is that muscle tension dysphonia is multifactorial with various contributing etiologies. METHODS This project is a retrospective chart review of all patients seen in the Voice Speech and Language Service and Swallowing Center at our institution...

Even though the perceived quality of a speaker’s natural voice does not necessarily guarantee the quality of synthesized speech, it is required to select a certain number of candidates based on their natural voice before moving to the evaluation stage of synthesized sentences. This paper describes a male speaker selection procedure for unit selection synthesis systems in English and Japanese ba...

This study is aimed to investigate the extent to which reporters’ voice and body behaviour may betray different degrees of emotional involvement when reporting on emergency situations. The hypothesis is that emotional involvement is associated with an increase in body movements and pitch and intensity variation. The object of investigation is a corpus of 21 10-second videos of Italian news repo...

The majority of previous studies on vocal expression have been conducted on posed expressions. In contrast, we utilized a large corpus of authentic affective speech recorded from real-life voice controlled telephone services. Listeners rated a selection of 200 utterances from this corpus with regard to level of perceived irritation, resignation, neutrality, and emotion intensity. The selected u...

We present intra-, interand cross-cultural classifications of vocal expressions. Stimuli were selected from the VENEC corpus and consisted of portrayals of 11 emotions, each expressed with 3 levels of intensity. Classification (nu-SVM) was based on acoustic measures related to pitch, intensity, formants, voice source and duration. Results showed that mean recall across emotions was around 2.4-3...