Departamento de Linguas e Culturas

In this paper we investigate parameters related to voice quality in European Portuguese (EP) emotional speech. Our main objectives were to obtain, to our knowledge for the first time, values for the parameters commonly contemplated in acoustic analyses of emotional speech and investigate if there is any difference for EP relative to the results obtained for other languages. A small corpus contemplating five emotions (joy, sadness, despair, fear, cold anger) and neutral speech produced by a professional actor was used. Parameters investigated include fundamental frequency, jitter, shimmer and Harmonic Noise Ratio. In general, results were in accordance with the consulted literature regarding F0 and HNR. For jitter and shimmer our results were, in certain aspects, similar to the ones reported in a study of emotional speech for Spanish, another Latin language. From our analyses, and taking into consideration the reduced size of our corpus and the use of an actor as informant, no clear EP characteristic emerged, except for a possible, needing confirmation, difference regarding joy, with values similar to neutral speech.

Variations in voice quality are essentially related to modifications of the glottal source parameters, such as: F0, jitter, and shimmer. Voice quality is affected by prosody, emotional state, and vocal pathologies. Psychogenic vocal pathology is particularly interesting. In the present case study, the speaker naturally presented a ventricular band voice whereas in a controlled production he was able to use a more normal phonation process. A small corpus was recorded which included sustained vowels and short sentences in both registers. A normal speaker was also recorded in similar tasks. Annotation and extraction of parameters were made using Praat's voice report function. Application of the Hoarseness Diagram to sustained productions situates this case in the pseudo-glottic phonation region. Analysis of several different parameters related to F0, jitter, shimmer, and harmonicity revealed that the speaker with psychogenic voice was capable of controlling certain parameters (e.g. F0 maximum) but was unable to correct others such as shimmer.

Résumé/Abstract En respectant la méthodologie du projet AMPER, déjà décrite de façon détaillée dans d'autres articles, soit en ce qui concerne l'organisation du corpus, soit en ce qui concerne la méthodologie d'analyse du signal acoustique, nous présentons maintenant des résultats obtenus pour trois aires dialectales du Portugal continental-Beira interior, Beira litoral et Algarve. Le corpus sur lequel se base notre analyse est constitué par un total de 144 énoncés, dans les modalités déclaratives et interrogatives totales, avec extension ...

Abstract The aim of this research was to continue the work in articulatory synthesis. Thus, a database was collected, containing the nasal sounds of European Portuguese (EP). This corpus includes the different phonetic contexts for the nasal vowels of EP, focusing on the regional variants. The recordings include voice signal, and, simultaneously, information about glottal source, obtained through an Electroglotograph (EGG).

This paper is about a starting project, which involves already more than 10 laboratories from Latin European countries. Here are summarized some basic points of our methodology as a guideline for the organization and normalization of research to come. In this Conference we would like to present some beta results obtained by the research teams of the Universities of Grenoble and Aveiro of some of the Romance Varieties already taken into account.