F-ratio of Speaker Variability in Emotional Speech

Various acoustic features were extracted and analyzed to estimate the inter- and intra-speaker variability of emotional speech. Tokens of vowel /a/ from sentences spoken with different modes of emotion (sadness, neutral, happiness, fear and anger) were analyzed. All of the acoustic features (fundamental frequency, spectral slope, HNR, H1-A1 and formant frequency) indicated greater contribution to inter- than intra-speaker variability across all emotions. Each acoustic feature of speech signal showed a different degree of contribution to speaker discrimination in different emotional modes. Sadness and neutral indicated greater speaker discrimination than other emotional modes (happiness, fear, anger in descending order of F-ratio). In other words, the speaker specificity was better represented in sadness and neutral than in happiness, fear and anger with any of the acoustic features.