FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY AND EMOTIONS: A STUDY BASED ON ACTED SPEECH IN BRAZILIAN PORTUGUESE

Abstract

Purpose: Fundamental Frequency (F0 ) in emotional and neutral speech in Brazilian Portuguese was analyzed. Methods: Three professional actresses participated in the survey reading a text in two conditions: neutral speech and acted emotion speech. Four emotions were taken into account for this study: joy, anger, fear and sadness. For each situation, actresses repeated five times, totaling 75 recordings. Speech sample recording took place in the Multimedia Lab Studio Electronic Computing Center of the University of São Paulo (USP-CCE) through specific equipment. A sentence was selected to be segmented and analyzed in smaller units (syllables). In order to obtain F0 values, the software PRAAT and some of its scripts were used. Results: Analyzing F0 average of each emotion, we found that joy shows higher frequency bands than sadness that has very low values of F0. Variation of F0 in anger remained similar among the actresses speech. On the other hand, fear did not offer any F0 range pattern. Conclusion: F0 values , both mean and variation, show to be important in the differentiation of emotions: joy, anger and sadness. Fear seems to suffer other acoustic and physiological influences – a those could be analyzed in a more broad study – other than F0.

Keywords

• Phonetics
• Speech acoustics
• Emotion