AUTOMATIC ANALYSIS OF VOCAL MANIFESTATIONS OF APPARENT MOOD OR AFFECT

Abstract: Skilled clinicians are able to integrate linguistic, paralinguistic, and non-linguistic cues in the assessment of mood disorders. This project identified duration- and amplitude-based aspects of the speech signal that can be measured automatically by computer and which provide paralinguistic information about the apparent affect of a speech sample. A group of 40 experimental subjects produced 1584 spoken renditions of sentences, in 3 conditions, uninstructed, depressive, or manic. An automatic speech recognition system extracted 10 paralinguistic parameter values from each of these spoken responses. Psychotherapists have a relatively uniform model of depressive and manic speech patterns, which shows up in distinct paralinguistic features of their speech when simulating these states. Several features are significantly different in the three simulated emotional states and these features can be detected automatically

Models and analysis of vocal emissions for biomedical applications

This book of Proceedings collects the papers presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications, MAVEBA 2003, held 10-12 December 2003, Firenze, Italy. The workshop is organised every two years, and aims to stimulate contacts between specialists active in research and industrial developments, in the area of voice analysis for biomedical applications. The scope of the Workshop includes all aspects of voice modelling and analysis, ranging from fundamental research to all kinds of biomedical applications and related established and advanced technologies