VOCAL EXPRESSION OF EMOTION: Acoustic Properties of Speech Are Associated With Emotional Intensity and Context

Jo-Anne Bachorowski and Michael J. Owren
1995 Psychological Science

Good paper on getting emotion from voice. It covers the properties of speech that are likely to provide external cues to emotions. They mainly examined fundamental frequency (F0), specifically jitter and shimmer from short speech samples. Their results indicate that speech can be used to index emotional processes, but they don't give a formula or claim that they achieved it. Keep in mind this paper is from 1995.

I emailed Bachorowski, and she was kind enough to give a bit of advice. She felt speech rate (wpm) and F0 would be of primary interest for our project, and amplitude might be a good secondary measure. She also sent me her 79 Page handbook chapter on Measuring Emotion-Related Vocal Acoustics. I'll be reading this when I have some time.

Quality: 4/5
Relevance: 5/5 (to emotion analysis)