A vowel-stress emotional speech analysis method

The analysis of speech, particularly for emotional content, is an open area of current research. This paper documents the development of a vowel-stress analysis framework for emotional speech, which is intended to provide suitable assessment of the assets obtained in terms of their prosodic attributes. The consideration of different levels of vowel-stress provides means by which the salient points of a signal may be analysed in terms of their overall priority to the listener. The prosodic attributes of these events can thus be assessed in terms of their overall significance, in an effort to provide a means of categorising the acoustic correlates of emotional speech. The use of vowel-stress is performed in conjunction with the definition of pitch and intensity contours, alongside other micro-prosodic information relating to voice quality.